Chapter 10- The Silva Woods

It has been two weeks since the garden party, and I am learning, day by day, what it means to be an empress.

I have been given a household to run, and I have spent the last two weeks learning everything I possibly can. For women like me, knowledge, I find, is the best way to wield influence, and now more than ever I feel how important it is to prove my worth.

I was never taught how to rule, because it was never expected of me. Now I find myself in a precarious situation and spend my evenings reading all that I can and asking Iona every question that I can think of about the staff. Between the two of us, we manage to make sure the emperor’s house runs smoother than it was.

Despite this, Theron has not summoned me to his bedchamber once since our wedding night. I keep to my own room, and he keeps to his. I have met with him exactly once in two weeks, and I am meeting with him again now, for the same dull and necessary reason: the ledgers.

“The kitchens are over budget,” I say, laying the book open on his black desk. “Not from waste, but from theft. I believe the steward has been writing down more bread than the ovens could hold and pocketing the difference for a year. I have the figures. I would like your permission to dismiss him.”

Theron looks at the columns, then at me, and something moves behind his gold eyes that I can’t quite place. “You found this yourself?”

“My maid Iona noticed, but I just confirmed the numbers.”

“Dismiss him,” he says. “And dock what he took from whatever he is owed.” He is quiet for a moment, studying me the way he studies a map. “You are not what I expected, wife.”

“I am not surprised," I agree. “People rarely expect much of me.”

Before he can respond, suddenly Cassius is there with a worrisome expression.

“Majesty.” He is breathing hard, as though he has been running. “A beast. A big one, out in the Silva Woods, north of the city. There are several working in a coordinated attack.”

Theron is already standing. He does not ask any further questions, except one. “Where is it heading?”

“It is just inside the tree line, close to the market road.”

Theron is moving, and the whole of him has changed. The stillness is gone. He now acts like a soldier, fast, certain, and calls for his horse as bits of his shadow seem to undulate around him.

“Send for Lykos,” Theron commands as he sweeps toward the door.

At the threshold he stops, turns, and points one gloved finger at me.

“You.” His voice brooks nothing. “Stay in the palace where it’s safe. Do you understand me?”

“I understand But-,”

“Not buts. This is an order.”

And before I can say anything else he is gone.

- -

I keep my word as best as I can, and stay in the castle until it is time for me to leave for my appointment. I tried to tell him about how I am supposed to meet with some spice traders that Lady Melina of House Corvus had recommended to me. But he left before I could say anything else.

I sigh.

I know the traders are expecting me, and it would be rude to cancel at the last minute.

I plan to meet with them to negotiate and settle the price for pepper, salt, cumin, clove, and saffron which currently costs quite a bit of silver. I am told they are more fair in their pricing, and it is my duty as Empress to settle matters related to domestic affairs, which includes the budgeting and oversight of the kitchens. I want to be sure that the price for said spices has not robbed Skiagreth of more coin than necessary, and avoid another bread situation.

The carriage crests a low hil and pulls up to a quaint little town. I see rows of trees just north of it, and feel a sense of dread fill’s me as the driver says cheerfully, that we are nearly there, that Sabine is a fine little town, that you can see the dark line of the Silva Woods from its market square.

The town is called Sabine, and it sits fairly close to the Silva Woods. The same forest, and merchant roads, that Theron dispatched to only hours ago, to address the dark beast attacks.

“Stop,” I say. “Stop the carriage.”

“But what for, my lady, we are nearly there?” the coachman asks, and he’s right.

“Right, well.” I make myself breathe. “Lets head in then. But tell me, if there was an attack against it, do these towns have any preventative measures?”

The coachman thinks for a moment. “Most do, though the defense varies from town to town. You are better off asking one of the locals, my lady.”

I nod at this information as we head down into the square, where it is a full market day. The cobbled streets are crowded with stalls, carts, and people. As I climb down from the carriage I am immediately greeted by the spice merchants. Several of them hurry towards me with their hands full of samples and their faces full of excitement, but none of them are aware of the dangers beyond the shadow of the trees.

Then I hear it.

Under the noise of the market, faint, sweet and utterly wrong.

Birdsong.

It is the same song from the crystal, the one from the dead thing on the road south, the one that comes only when the beasts are near. It is far off and thin, but it is there, threaded under the ordinary day, and goosebumps form along my arms.

“My lady?” The eldest of the spice traders, a broad, kind woman named Doria, speaks. “You have gone pale. Is everything alright?”

“Listen to me.” I take her hands, worried. “There is a dark beast coming. From the wood. You have to get these people away from the trees, now, back somewhere safe.”

“Safe?” Doria replies, confused.

“Yes, wherever the townspeople go when there is an attack. You must go now, before there is no time.”

She stares at me. “My lady, there is no need to worry, the wardens would have rung the—”

“The wardens do not hear it yet,” I interrupt. “I do. Now go. This is my command as your empress.”

I have never felt the need to use my authority before, and perhaps I am mad to use it now, on nothing but a dreadful feeling and a song that only I can hear. But this uneasiness in my chest and every instinct I have is screaming at me, that I am not wrong. A more quiet part of me feared that even with the crown it would not be enough to convince her. Yet I see her already calling out, ordering people back, and my command moves through the market the way a crack moves through ice, slow and then all at once. For a moment I feel relief, glad that Doria listens to me, even if it is only because I am an Empress.

People begin to head for the stone church, reluctantly, and many of them mutter displeasures as they pass. But I pay them no mind. I stand in the middle of the town square, and make sure they file into the heavy stone church that serves the lord of shadows.

When the last of them move in, with the exception of several grumbling stragglers, I let myself breathe. I pull out the crystal I always keep in my pocket, and my hands won’t stop shaking as I hold it.

“Please work. Please work.” I say to myself, wishing, and willing for this to work.

I know I am hollow, but since I have had more access to the emperor’s library, I have been studying the properties of Nibheis ore along with duties of what it means to be an empress. I know it is shameful, for how badly I want to be useful, but I hate the way the court whispers of my faults. If I cannot use magic, I can at least try to learn to better understand the magical properties of the ore, learn to better govern the household, and perhaps make something of myself as an alchemist.

Among the household books I found one on Nibheis ore, on how a viewing crystal can be pushed, worked, made to throw its sight outward instead of only into a far-off recording meant for other eyes. I have tried it a dozen times in my room and gotten nothing for it but a headache and a nosebleed. It is one thing to borrow sight from someone who wears a crystal of their own; it is another thing entirely, and far harder, to use the same crystal to push your own sight outward from the stone in your hand, especially as someone who is hollow.

I press my thumb to the cold blue stone and I push.

Nothing. A roar of static behind my eyes, the world smearing, my own pulse loud as a drum, and nothing.

“Come on,” I breathe. “Come on, come on, come one.”

The song swells. Closer. Under my feet now, in my teeth.

I push again, harder, until I taste copper, until the headache splits white behind my eyes, and this time the crystal answers.

The square drops away. For one reeling, sickening moment I am everywhere at once, above the town, seeing it flat and small like a map drawn in light, the church, the road, the fleeing people, the dark wall of the wood, and moving out of that dark wall, low, fast, big, and wrong in every joint, a shape the size of a cart, all teeth and hunger, aimed like arrows upon a battlefield are the dark beasts. I see men fighting them, Theron’s men, but one breaks the line and barrels towards the town, and it is faster than the stragglers who have yet to make it inside the safety of the church walls.

I drop back into my own body and I feel dizzy.

But there is no time.

Quickly I am running to the market square, screaming at them, at the old man and the two children who have frozen the way prey freezes, and I do the only useful thing I know how to do, which is to yell.

“RUN! RUN AND DON’T LOOK BACK!!!”

The beast breaks the tree line. My feet move against the cobbled stone before I can think. I only have time to grab the child closest to me and lift him, and I do not reach the old man or the other child, and guilt tears through me, but I am only one person. The boy is crying in my arms as I run and panic roars in my ears.

I have seen one before, on the road south, dead and cooling, and I have seen them through a dying man's eyes in the crystal, but nothing prepares me for the size, the speed, the smell of one alive and hunting. The ground shakes, and the beast releases a shriek that no natural animal should be able to make.

Tears blur my eyes. I am not going to make it, and a fault line of regret cracks straight down the center of my chest. My mother, Mikli, Mealla, all of them rise in my mind as I watch the distant doors of the church swing shut.

We did not make it. The hair on the back of my neck lifts, and I throw myself to the side just as a beam of light tears past where I stood. It takes me a heartbeat to understand it came from the beast itself, from its open jaws, and my blood runs cold. They do not only claw and bite. They wield magic too, the way we do, and no one ever tells you that until you are watching it burn a hole through a market stall. I shove the child down behind me and the barrels.

There is no time.

I look back and see blood where the old man was, and the other child screaming. So I turn and face the beast the only way I can, empty-handed. Its head is that of a bear, but rows of spikes ridge its spine, and when it roars its breath is so vile that I gag.

It swipes at me. I move on instinct, trying to dodge, but pain blooms through my arm as the blow throws me back against the wall of the market building.

They say Emperor Theron can command shadows, though no one seems to know quite how. Some say he bends the darkness to his will, others that he can only shape it into weapons. Right now I see a mix of both at once.

The beast is engulfed in an outline of pure black ink, swirling thick around it, holding it down like shackles.

And then I see him.

Theron, and behind him a black tide of horses pouring down the far road, and the shadows seem to darken the moment our eyes meet, curling thicker from his form.

Somehow he is there, and he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, even with his features set somewhere between irritation and cold calculation. Before I can process what is happening, a blade of pure shadow cuts through the beast, and the darkness binding it seems to pierce it too as he closes the distance. The head of the creature is sliced clean off as the body takes three shuddering steps before falling to the ground dead.

Several more dark beasts break the tree line as Cassius casts up a thicket of shadow-spears, pinning them down before they can reach the market square. As another beast dodges Cassius' attack, it meets its end under Theron's shadow.

“Get to the church!” Theron yells at me, and I suddenly remember that standing here frozen will not save anyone. I turn, seize the sniffling boy, and run for the church.

I look back once, and see Theron cut down another dark beast with a single masterful pass.

Lykos comes by on horseback with the other child held against him, and he throws out that black swirling vortex.

"Over here, my lady!" he shouts.

I reach him and take the second child, holding both, and step through the portal, and when I do I am suddenly inside the barricaded church. Outside, the warden's bells are ringing. Doria looks at me, and I give her a silent nod. I can hear the snarl of more beasts and the shouting beyond the walls, and then, at last, an eerie quiet settles over the aftermath.

It is over.

Lykos steps into the church from his portal. "It is safe now. The threat is dealt with."

Everyone breathes out at once as the doors are opened again. I stand there in shock, the weeping child still in my arms, until one of the spice traders comes to me and gently gathers him away, ushering him off, murmuring something through her own quiet tears. I think she is thanking me. But it is too much to hold all at once, and I am left standing there alone.

My heart still races from adrenaline, because despite the beasts being killed, I still hear it. The bird-like song. It has not yet stopped. But I have no room left in me to wonder at that when Theron finds me.

I feel the change in the square before I see him swing off from his horse and approach me. I look up, and I have never seen his face like this.

There is something raw and terrible and open in it, his eyes moving over me, my hands, my throat, my face, checking, the way a person checks a thing they were sure they had lost. That is when I realize my arm is bleeding.

“You’re hurt.”

I look down, and only now do I see that my arm is indeed, still bleeding.

“Oh.”

“Stubborn. Reckless. Are you completely out of your mind?” Theron says, frowning, and his hand closes around my arm in a way that I cannot help but hiss at the pain. That is when I feel it. His hands are trembling slightly despite all his anger and steadying demeanor.

For a moment I think he may be concerned. But that thought slams shut, so hard and fast when his next words come out as ice.

“I told you,” he says, with a raw, quiet anger, “to stay in the palace.”

“I did not—”

“I told you to stay behind the walls,” he interrupts, his voice building, “yet I ride to a dark beast attack and find my wife, here, in the middle of it.”

His voice lowers and somehow that is worse. “I told you to stay put, but instead I find you, the daughter of my enemy, in a border town, on the very day it burns. Tell me, Empress, why is that? And how do you think that looks to me?”

The unfairness of it steals my breath, because I obeyed him, I obeyed him to the letter, and I have just spent the worst minutes of my life trying to help in the best way that I can, but it seems even that is not enough.

“I obeyed you,” I say, and my voice shakes with something that is no longer fear. “I stayed out of the palace only to come here, to Sabine, to a meeting that was set a week ago, to buy pepper for your kitchens, because that is the work you gave me. I did not know Sabine sat under the Silva Wood. No one told me. I didn’t know—”

“Even if you did not know, you will be held accountable for your disobedience.”

I see his anger but my own rage builds inside and rises to meet it.

“I didn’t disobey!” I shout, but then take a deep breath. “I stayed until I had to leave for my appointment. I apologize that I didn’t check or know it was so close.”

I hate that tears form in my eyes as I speak my truth. “I didn’t want to cancel on them. And when I heard the beasts before your wardens did, I tried to get everyone to safety.”

I point to the people in the square. “Besides, if I had stayed in your palace behind your shield like a good and useless thing, these two children would be dead, and you would have ridden into a slaughter instead of just a fight.”

He looks at me. The ice does not melt, not all the way, because the fear underneath it has not melted either, and I understand, dimly, even through my anger, that he is not truly furious that I disobeyed.

“We will speak of this at home,” is all he says, and turns to Lykos. "See to the wounded. Burn the dead beasts carcasses. I want the tree line watched until dark." His gaze cuts back to me for half a second, no warmer than before. "And someone bind the empress's arm before she bleeds through her sleeve."

It is not concern. I tell myself it is not concern.

A woman comes for me almost at once, gray-haired and quick-handed, and leads me to a canvas tent they have thrown up at the edge of the square where the other wounded are being laid out. She sits me down and peels the torn silk from my arm and clicks her tongue at the gash beneath it, and I let her work, because it gives me something to do that is not looking at the space where Theron used to be standing.

"You are lucky, my lady," she says, threading a needle. "A hand's width over and it would have found the bone. Hold still now."

I hold still. The needle bites. It hurts, but despite the pain I am distracted. The birdsong has not stopped. It is quieter now, here, under the canvas, muffled by the moans of the wounded and the bark of orders outside. But it is there, thin and sweet and wrong, threaded through everything, and now that the terror has drained out of me there is nothing left to drown it out. It does not sound like a beast.

The beast is dead. This is something else, something small, and it is pulling at me the way a current pulls at your ankles, patient and certain, and I find myself on my feet before I have decided to stand.

"My lady?" The healer looks up, having just finished stitching up my arm. "I am not finished, I need to wrap the wound."

“Very well, be quick.” I say as my leg bounces with restlessness. The moment she is finished I slip out the back of the tent, past the wounded and the wardens, to the ragged margin of the square where the market gives way to the dark and the quiet, following a thread of birdsong that only I can hear, toward the very wood where several dark beasts just came out of, which is the maddest thing I have ever done. But I cannot stop myself from doing it.

It is in the roots of a great fallen tree, half-hidden, and when I part the ferns the song stops, all at once, as though it has been holding its breath for me to arrive.

It is a fox.

A small one, slightly bigger than a cat, but smaller than a big dog.

It is the most beautiful and impossible thing I have ever seen. Its fur is the red of a banked fire, deepening to true flame at the tip of its tail, where a small living fire burns, low and red-gold, curling like a candle in a draft.

It is hurt.

One of its hind legs is bent wrong and its side is torn, and the creature's breathing is shallow and quick.

It should be afraid of me. Everything alive is afraid, this close to death, and I am a stranger and a giant and I smell of the thing that killed its kin.

It looks at me with eyes like two drops of molten gold, and it does not run.

“Oh,” I whisper. “Oh, you poor thing. It is all right. I am not going to hurt you.”

I reach for it slowly, the way you reach for any frightened animal, giving it every chance to bite me or bolt, and it does neither. It watches my hand come, and when my fingers close gently around its small broken body and the little flame at its tail licks up over my wrist, I flinch, bracing for the burn.

It does not burn me.

The fire moves over my skin like warm sunlight. I stare in wonder.

This fire should burn me, but it doesn't. The fox presses its face into my palm and goes still, and lets out a shaky breath.

“All right,” I say gently, my voice thick. “It’s going to be alright. I got you. No one is going to kill you. Not while I am here.”

I do not decide to hide it so much as discover that I already have, that my cloak is around it before I have thought it through. I take it back to the other side of the tents and have the hold woman help me set its leg. To my surprise, the fox-like creature doesn’t react, it doesn’t yelp, and only shivers.

My heart aches at the sight.

“My lady, I have helped the fox, but it could be dangerous.”

“Not a word of this to anyone.” I say firmly and the old woman bows and leaves to attend to others. I keep the fox close to me, all the way up through the carriage ride back home.

“Quiet now,” I breathe into its fur. “Quiet, and let me get you home.”

It whines the whole ride back, low and thin under my cloak, and I hum to it under my breath the way I once hummed to Mikli through his shaking fever, some tuneless northern nothing, until it quiets against my ribs.

But when the carriage passes under the shadow-shield at last and I climb down into the torchlit dark of the fortress and start up the long hall toward my rooms, Theron is there, waiting, with another scowl on his face.

“What are you carrying,” he says.

It is not a question. It never is, with him.

“Nothing,” I say, which is the first lie I have told him, and it is a bad one, because I am no good at them.

“Bree.” Just my name, cold and level. “Show me your hands.”

And there is no way out of it, so I open my cloak.

The fox lifts its small head. The flame at its tail catches the torchlight, and I hear the guards behind him go still, and I feel Theron go very, very quiet.

“Do you purposely make it a habit to be disobedient?” He says incredulously.

“No.”

“No?” He scoffs, “ then what is that?”

“A pet.”

“A pet?” Theron's eyebrow raised. “That is no pet. That is likely one of the dark beast kin ”

“It is hurt,” I say. “It is a baby. It is smaller than a dog, Theron, look at it, it can barely—”

“It is a beast.” His voice firmly cuts across mine. “Offspring, most likely, of the thing I killed today. Of the thing that wounded your arm and killed several townsfolk, which means in a season it will be huge, monstrous and in my house, and at my wife's throat while she sleeps. Hand it to me.”

“No.”

The word falls into the courtyard and everything stops.

I have never said no to him. Not once. I feel the whole weight of what I am doing settle onto me, that I am refusing the emperor of the south, the man who kills beasts without blinking, over a wounded animal, in front of his guards, and that he could take it from me with a word, and that there is not a single thing I could do to stop him.

“Hand it over. I’m not asking.” He holds out his hand, but I hold the fox tighter to me.

“No,” I say again, and I make myself look up into those cold gold eyes and not away.

“It has done nothing. It is hurt and it is frightened and it did not choose what it was born as, any more than I chose to be born hollow, any more than that boy Elio chose to be born a second son. You would kill it for what it might become. I have had my whole life decided for me by what people were sure I would be, and they were wrong, every one of them, and I will not do it to this.”

I step back and raise my chin defiantly. “If you want it, you will take it out of my cold dead hands, and you will explain to my father and to your court why the empress died clutching a fox.”

It is quiet for a very long time.

Theron looks at me, and at the small burning creature in my arms, and something works behind his face that I cannot read, and I brace for the worse.

It does not come.

“If it sheds one drop of blood in this house,” he says at last, each word slow and final, “if it harms one servant, one guard, one child, if it so much as bites the hand that feeds it, I will kill it myself, and you will not stop me, and you will not hate me for it, because I will have warned you. Do you understand what I am giving you.”

“I understand.”

“Say it.”

“If it hurts anyone, it dies,” I say. “And I will have no one to blame but myself.”

He holds my eyes one moment longer. Then he steps aside, out of the doorway, and lets me carry the creature into his house. My heart is pounding and the fox settles against me, warm against my ribs, and I do not understand why a man who trusts no one has just chosen to trust me with this.

I climb the rest of the stairs, cradling the fox. Perhaps he fears my father, or the repercussions of hurting me in front of everyone, but that is not something a man called a tyrant could care about. I look down at the creature and hum a gentle tune.

All I do know is that the birdsong is quiet now, and that the fox is mine, and I will not let anyone take it from me.