Chapter 12- The Emporer's Questions

It takes me four days to work up the courage to ask my husband to dinner, and when I finally do, standing in the door of his study with my heart trying to climb out of my throat, he looks at me for a long moment and says only, yes.

So now we are here.

The two of us.

Alone.

At a table built for forty, in a silence so complete I can hear the candles burn, and I cannot for the life of me remember why I thought this was a good idea.

Aodh lies across my feet under the table, a warm and secret weight, the one comfortable thing in the room.

The food is beautiful but I am so nervous that I cannot taste any of it. Theron sits at the head of the table and I sit to his right as is tradition.

I do not know what to say, and he does not speak.

So I wait as the candles burn down in the quiet space. The only sound is the silverware clattering against the porcelain plates. Perhaps I have made a terrible mistake in asking him to have dinner with me every evening. Then, when I have nearly given up on the evening entirely, he sets down his knife.

“The kitchens have improved,” he says, “since you began overseeing them.”

I blink and realize he is talking to me. But I am terrible at small talk. Still, I recognize that I should respond and do.

“The steward was stealing forty measures of flour a month and selling it, and claiming more of it was needed to make more bread when there was none,” I say. “Once I dismissed him, the accounts balanced, and there was more coin for better things like spice. So yes. Mathematically the budget for the kitchens should be improved. I do enjoy the taste usually, and hope you can taste the difference. I cannot, but that is because I am too nervous to taste anything tonight.”

Theron looks at me.

He looks at me for what feels like a very long time, and I have the sinking sensation I get in rooms full of people, the sense that I have handed someone a thing that was not the thing they wanted, and I do not know how to take it back or what to put in its place.

“I see,” he says at last, and picks his knife back up, and I want to crawl under the table and lie down beside the fox. “Well hopefully you can enjoy the fruits of your labor another night.”

The silence comes back. It is worse now. His gaze drifts down, once, to the flicker of warm light at my feet, where the tip of Aodh's tail has strayed out past the hem of my dress.

“I see your pet is behaving,” he says.

“He is very well-behaved.” I seize on it, grateful for a subject change. “Did you know foxes belong to the Canidae family? The same as wolves and dogs. I read it in your library. They are not truly cats, though people say they are as sly as a cat. In fact, they are far more closely related to dogs than they are to any cat. And they are the only member of the family that retracts its claws, like a cat, which is a strange thing, that the one dog-cousin that is not a cat should keep the one habit of one. I find that sort of thing very interesting.” I hear myself. I cannot stop myself. “Most people do not.”

Theron stares at me.

The fox at my feet has gone very still, and I swear, for a second I hear Aodh grumble about being called a common dog and I can’t help but chuckle slightly.

“No,” Theron agrees. “I don't suppose they do.”

I look up at him for a moment. And I am certain, now, that I have ruined it, that the whole disastrous evening was a mistake, that he agreed to it out of some cold courtesy and is counting the minutes until he can return to his maps. I brace for him to end it. I have my apology half-built already, some graceful thing about the hour being late.

Instead he surprises me.

“My mother used to keep a fox,” he says.

I go still.

That is not something I was expecting. I study him then and can tell that this is different. I can’t explain how I know for sure, but it carries a different kind of weight. I realize with a small shock that he is not counting the minutes at all. He is, in his cold and careful way, trying.

“I did not know that,” I say, carefully.

“There is no reason you would. It was a long time ago.” He turns his cup a slow quarter-turn on the cloth, the only restless thing about him. “The old songs of the south are full of them. Foxes, and beasts that were not beasts, and a time before the empires when the line between a man and the thing in the wood was thinner than it is now. My mother knew all of the stories. She used to say the old world was still in the ground under us, or in the woods, sleeping, and that if you were very quiet, in the right places, you could still hear it. Their voices.” He says it lightly, the way a man says a thing he has not let himself think about in years. “Children's stories. But she believed them, I think, at the end.”

You could still hear it.

The words land wrong.

Voices? Like Aodh's voice? I think to myself.

This is bad. Real bad.

I have never said aloud to a living soul about hearing the songs before the dark beast attacks or even that I can hear Aodh speak. My heart lurches so hard it hurts. He is watching me. He said it and now he is watching my face. I know this tactic. I have seen it in my father’s house. I have spent a lifetime being called out, and right now he may be calling me out.

Sweat beads form on my brow as I scramble for cover.

“I didn’t know that. I think it’s interesting that she could hear the voices.”

I say but Theron just frowns. His gaze is intense and I can’t bear the look of it for another second so I avert my gaze.

“I never said that, do you think it’s real?”

I am too full of my own fear, from four days of dread, and I can’t take it. He knows.

“It is,” I blurt. “I have heard it. The voices are like a song. I have heard it my whole life, before every beast attack, every time, a song like birds but wrong, and no one else ever hears it and I thought I was mad but maybe your mother could hear it too, because she is right, it is real, it is—”

I stop.

The temperature of the room suddenly drops, and it is not the candles, it is him. The shadows in the corners of the great hall, which had been ordinary shadows, have deepened. They pool thicker at the edges of the light, and though his face has not moved at all, though he has not so much as leaned forward, I feel the man across from me change the way you feel a door lock somewhere in a house at night.

“What song,” Theron says, and there is no warmth in his voice at all.

“I, it is nothing.” The retreat comes too late and we both know it. “A sound. A ringing. It is probably nothing, it is probably just an odd thing my ears do, I should not have—”

“You said before every beast attack.” He sets the cup down. “You said you have heard it your whole life. That is not just a ringing in the ears. Choose your next words wisely. You do not wish to anger me.” And then, still cold, he asks. “For how long?”

“I— I don’t—”

“How. Long.” He says with more assertiveness.

I swallow and fidget with my dress. Did I misread the situation? I am scared, but I answer.

“Since I was a child.” The truth comes out of me because it's easier and more natural. I hate it. I hate this about myself. Did he really not know? I struggle to breathe, but clench and unclench my dress in the oppressive silence. “I do not know why. I have never told anyone about it.”

“Who taught you to listen for it?”

“No one. I did not learn it. It is just there, like a color, or the cold. I did not choose to hear it. It just comes naturally.”

“How did you know the beast was coming at Sabine?” He asks flatly. Each question is a stone set precisely on the last, building a wall, and I can see him building it.

“Speak Bree, and tell me the truth. Do not keep me waiting or make me ask again.”

I keep clenching and unclenching my dress. “I heard the song. I mean, you mentioned the Silva Woods and the coachman said it was close to Sabine, but then I heard the bird song.” I ramble out quickly.

“I see. So that is how my hollow wife knew a beast was coming before the wardens could spot them. Is this correct?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

It’s quiet for a bit longer before Theron speaks again.

“And what else do you hear,” he says, “that the rest of us cannot.”

And there it is, the edge of the cliff, because the true answer is a talking fox on my feet with a fiery tail that does not burn me, and there is my mother who is ill and the information I have been sending north to keep my mother safe. I feel the whole terrible flood of it rising in my throat, all of it wanting to come out at once when I am frightened, and I dig my nails into my own palm under the table until it hurts, and I hold. For the first time in my life, I hold onto the thing that matters most. I will not tell this man about Aodh or my mother. Even if I am a terrible liar.

“Nothing,” I say. “Only the song. That is all. I swear it.”

It is the first whole lie I have ever told him, and it is built to guard a fox, and he hears the lie in it the way he heard the truth in everything else. His gaze then becomes as hard as iron when I look up to meet his eyes.

“You know,” he says, conversational now, “what I find remarkable is how you came to me as a promise.”

I feel my heart race and avert my gaze again.

“Look at me. Directly.” he says with that commanding tone. I have heard it before, from my own father, from people at court, and people who demand respect and value power. So I look. I maintain eye contact and his gaze is intense.

“Tell me, Bree, should I be counting the days until you become a threat, or has that already happened, and I simply have not noticed?”

“I’m not a threat.” I manage to whisper. It’s getting harder to focus on his eyes.

“Oh really? Hmmmmm, you are very good at looking harmless. It is the thing I like least about you."

I don’t know how to respond. He sets his goblet down and I see him stand. I move to stand too but he motions for me to sit. It's at this moment I wish I had brought the dagger my brother had given to me. I didn’t think I would ever need it. But as Theron walks up to me he suddenly grips my throat, pushing me into the chair.

I break eye contact and my heart hammers. I freeze. I’m scared. Is he going to kill me?

“Your heart is racing so fast, my dearest wife. Is it because you know your father has moved his troops closer along the Pass of Arryndale? Or perhaps…” He leans closer then and whispers in my ear. “... something quieter, something deadlier has walked with you down south?”

“I-I I don’t know. I didn’t walk down. Sir Lykos teleported us.” I blabber because it is true. My eyes begin to water and he lets go. He sighs and moves his hand through his hair. I rub my neck. I look away. I can’t look at him and the air that sits between us is tense, but I can sense underneath everything he is upset with me.

“Yes. I’m aware. I was the one who sent him to pick you up.” At that Theron moves back to the head of the table. I don’t see him move as I’m still looking down, but I can hear him move. He sighs again.

“And now I learn that my wife hears things. Things no hollow woman should be able to hear. It seems you are a great many surprising things, Empress. Forgive me, if I have grown wary of surprises.”

“I am not spying on you.” It comes out fast. “The song is not, it has nothing to do with my father, I would never—”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe a woman who hears secret songs and sends secret letters to the country that has spent five years trying to kill me.” He interrupts. “Now, who do you write to?”

The question comes from nowhere and lands like a dropped stone, and my heart stops.

“What?”

“The letters.” His gold eyes do not leave my face. “Look at me, and tell me who you send your letters to. I know you send letters north. Cassius knows it, I know it, do not insult us both by pretending otherwise.”

And I am cornered, truly cornered, and I reach for the one thing that is both true and safe, the softest and most precious thing I have.

“My mother,” I say. “I write to my mother.”

Something flickers across his face, surprise, quickly mastered. “The Empress Eliza does not strike me as a woman who—”

“Not her.” The words come out sharp, sharper than I mean them to, when I interrupt him. Because of everyone in the world he could have named, he named her, Canute's cold queen, my father's wife, the woman who was never anything to me. “Not the Empress. Eliza is my father's wife. She is not my mother. My mother was a maid.”

The room goes quiet in a new way.

I remember to blink and my gaze briefly diverts from his eyes to his nose as I try to regain my composure and push down the unease that keeps growing beneath my ribs.

“My mother is a maid,” I say again, and now that the door is open I cannot seem to close it, and it is the truth that comes out. “Well before he married, during the first campaign against the dark beasts, when he returned home he slept with a maid and got me and never once let me forget it. She is sick. She has been sick for a long time, and the letters I write are to ask if she is warm, to tell her I am alive, and to pretend, on paper, that I am happy here, so that she does not spend what strength she has left being afraid for me. That is what my letters say, Your Imperial Majesty. You may read them, if you like. They will bore you to tears.”

I am breathing too hard. My chest aches with it. I have said far, far too much, the way I always do, and I wait for him to use it, to turn my dying mother into another stone in his wall.. In the same way my own father has always used her as my own weakness.

For a long moment it’s quiet and Theron simply looks at me.

I cannot read his face. I have never been good at reading people’s faces, but behind him I see that the shadows in the corners have stopped their pooling, and have gone quiet and still.

Tears leave my eyes.

Quickly I wipe them away. My senses are at their limit.

What a horrible idea. To ask for quality time in the form of dining together, and now I am struggling to not have a meltdown after a tense conversation.

I take a deep breath. But it doesn't take away from what I just did. I handed him over the truth. That I am a bastard daughter and filled with so much fear and grief. I look down and hope he doesn’t ask me to look at him again.

“It is late,” is all he says. I hear the chair move as he undoubtedly rises, and from the corner of my eyes I see the shadows rise with him. “Thank you for the dinner, Bree. The kitchens truly have improved.”

And he leaves me there, at a table built for forty, with the candles burning down and the food gone cold and my whole chest aching, and I do not know if I have saved myself or ruined myself, and I suspect, in the way of this place, that I have somehow managed both.

It is only when I am walking back through the dark corridors to my rooms, Aodh a small warm shadow trotting at my heel, that the last of it catches up with me, the cold horror sliding into place behind the humiliation.

“He knows about the letters,” I whisper to the fox. “I confirmed it. I sat there and told the emperor of the south that I do send letters north, to the country his enemy rules, and I let him think he had pulled it out of me, so he would not look for the worse thing. I gave him the truth to hide the lie.” I press my hand to my aching chest. “And now he will watch the letters. He will watch every letter. And Torsten's letters go the same road as my mother's.”

Aodh says nothing. He only leans his small burning weight against my ankle as we walk, warm and steady and harmless, and it does not burn me, and I am far too frightened, tonight, to wonder why.