Chapter 14- A Court of Knives

It is strange how much a man can change the silence between one meal and the next, but one thing is certain, Theron mentioned the voices. Voices from the stories his mother told him. So I spend the rest of the afternoon in the library trying to see if I can learn anything about them, but all I find are faerie tales and old folk stories.

I grumble in frustration. One is about a phoenix who takes the shape of a man and loves a mortal woman, so long as she never speaks his name aloud after he gives it to her. She breaks the promise. The phoenix is lost, and the woman is left weeping in the trees, and the tale says her voice still carries through the woods, calling a name that can no longer answer.

Another is about a she-wolf who marries a human lord, on the single condition that he never look upon her during the full moon. He breaks it. He wakes and sees a great wolf in his wife's chamber, and he kills it. But only when it is dead does the body soften back into the woman he loved.

Sad stories, really. But nothing talking about the bird like noises and melodic melody of the voices I have heard.

I sigh and put the books away.

“Can you really not tell me why I hear these odd voices?” I ask Aodh, who lies beside me as I read.

“I cannot.”

“Cannot, or will not?”

“Cannot. It is not my place to speak of truths and oaths made between others.”

I sigh again. “Can you at least tell me a little bit about this sickness, or whatever it is, that is turning the magical beasts into these dark ones and forcing them into these mindless monsters?”

“Even I don’t know the truth of that,” Aodh responds. “But it is a blight upon them, from the hidden places of the world. Deep within the mountains and beyond the woods.”

I pause. “Beyond the woods? Does this blight have an origin?”

Aodh seems to think.

“All things have origins. Some are only long forgotten.”

I groan in frustration. “I just want to see if I can save them, or at least prevent them from being hurt.”

“So you say.”

“So I do say.”

“Humans can lie.”

“Not me.”

“That is a lie.”

“Let me rephrase. I do not like to lie, nor do I do it easily.”

Aodh chuckles. “In that regard, we are the same. Dark beasts, and all magical beasts, cannot directly lie or speak untruths.”

At that, I hear the bells of the clock tower.

“I should get going.”

Aodh nods, and in a puff of smoke from his tail, he vanishes.

Unsure, and no wiser than when I began, I go down to the great hall to hear the petitions of court, as Theron asked of me this morning.

The hall is already full when I arrive.

Silk, low laughter, the click of rings on goblets, and a hundred nobles not yet called to order. Too many faces. Too many sounds. The old drowning feeling rises, and I do what I always do in a room like this. I look for a face I know.

I find two, and I make for them the way a cold traveler makes for a fire. I am so fixed on reaching them that I barely notice the lords near the dais who go quiet as I pass, and turn, murmuring to each other behind their cups. I notice, but am unsure what to make of this information. For now I approach the faces I recognize which are Lady Melina and Sir Lykos.

“and I am telling you,” Melina is saying, as I come within earshot, “that if you had waited half a breath longer before charging in, my brother would have had the boar himself, and you would not have such a scar to bore us all with at supper.”

“I have never been bored a day in my life,” says Lykos, “and certainly not by my own scars. They are one of my best features.”

“They are your only unique feature besides your eyes.”

“Lady Melina, you wound me worse than the boar did.”

Melina laughs.

“Empress.” Lykos sees me first, and something in his face gentles from the sparring into a real welcome, and he inclines his head. “You have arrived just in time to settle a dispute. Lady Melina is under the impression that I am not the finest blade in the three provinces.”

“He fell off a wall at Lord Dukas wedding,” Melina informs me.

“I was pushed by a wall. The wall moved.”

“Walls do not move, Lord Lykos.”

“This one had ambitions.”

I watch them banter, a quick warm back-and-forth of people who like each other, and I am not sure how to respond as they carry the conversation with ease. Melina catches my eye and the sparring falls away, and for a moment she is only my friend, reading my face the way she has learned to.

“You okay?,” she asks, low. “Have you eaten? Never mind. Stay near me when they call the hall to order. If anyone tries anything, you let me and Xanthe can do the talking, and you—”

“There she is.”

The voice cuts across Melina's, smooth and unhurried.

I turn to find a lord approaching me with two others at his shoulder, a big man in wine-dark velvet with a heavy gold chain and a smile that does not reach his green eyes.

I recognize him from the wedding.

Lord Petros.

His house keeps the vineyards, and he has never once looked at me as though I were a person.

“The empress herself,” Petros says, and bows just deep enough for it not to be an insult. “We are honored to see you today. We so rarely see you at court. I confess some of us had begun to wonder whether the northern air had made you delicate.”

“I am not delicate,” I say. “I find crowds difficult. It is not the same thing.”

A flicker of something crosses his face, he did not expect to be answered plainly, and then the smile widens.

“No,” he agrees. “I imagine you find a great many things difficult, so far from home. Tell me, Your Majesty, since you are here, perhaps you can lay a small matter to rest. There is the most remarkable story going about. From Sabine, of all places.”

And there it is. I feel it land in my stomach like a stone.

“They say,” Petros goes on, pitching his voice just loud enough that the nearest groups fall quiet to listen, “that when the dark beasts came, you knew before any of the wardens did. Before the bells. That you stood in the square and heard it coming.” He tilts his head. “A hollow woman. Hearing what trained wardens could not. Now how could that be, I wonder?”

“Perhaps,” says Melina lightly, stepping in smooth as oil, “the empress simply has better ears than the wardens, my lord. I hear some were caught drinking your very wine prior to the incident.”

A ripple of laughter. Petros does not take his eyes off me.

“It is possible, Lady Corvus, after all my wine is very popular. I do not monitor who drinks it responsibly once it has left my stores," he says. “But I did not ask Lady Corvus. I asked the empress. How did you know the dark beast was coming, Your Majesty?”

The hall has gone quieter now. I can feel the attention gathering, the way weight gathers on ice before it cracks, and I know, with the cold clarity I get when there is no way out but through, that whatever I say will likely be turned against me.

If I lie, he will smell it. If I tell the truth, I hand him exactly what he wants. Proof that I am a threat. The enemy's daughter who hears unnatural things, and unfit to sit beside their emperor.

“She does not owe you an answer, Petros.”

This is Xanthe, arriving at my other side in a drift of pale gold silk, her voice bored and cutting all at once. “She is your empress. You do not interrogate her in an anteroom like a steward caught skimming the wine. It is unbecoming. Someone might think House Petros had forgotten its manners along with its influence.”

“Lady Xanthe.” Petros inclines his head, and there is real dislike between them, old and mutual. “So protective of the throne's newest ornament. One might ask why.”

“One might ask a great many things,” Xanthe says. “Wisdom is knowing which questions will cost you.”

But Petros is not here for my ladies-in waiting answers. He keeps his eyes on me, and I understand he will not stop until I have spoken, and that hiding behind them is its own kind of answer. The empress who cannot speak for herself.

So I step forward, and speak for myself.

“You want to know how I knew,” I say, and I keep my voice firm and steady.

The hall stills.

“Yes,” Petros says. “I am sure a great many of us wish to know the truth.”

“Then I will tell you the truth.” I meet his eyes, which costs me, but I do it. “My coachman told me, on the road, that Sabine sat close to the Silva Wood. The same wood the emperor had ridden out to that very morning, on account of the beasts. I did not need a gift to set those two things beside each other, my lord. I needed only to be paying attention. I had this…. This terrible gut feeling. So I got the townspeople to the church.”

I turn to the rest of the court as I keep speaking. “I would rather look like a fool for emptying a market square over nothing than bury children because I was too proud to trust my own unease.” I let that sit. “As it happened, the unease was warranted. You may call it luck, instinct, or me being a nervous northern. But whatever you call it, a town still stands as a result.”

It is true. Every word of it is true, and that is what makes it hold. I watch Petros search for a loose thread he was so certain would be there, but fails to find it.

"You know," says a new voice, thoughtful, from the side, "I once read a story where those who could sense the beasts coming did so through the power of song. A gift, the tale called it. Not a curse."

I turn.

It is Lord Basileus, of the Summer Isles, blue-haired and brown-skinned and rich with coral.

I remember him from my wedding.

The way he cupped my face and fished for what I feared. He approaches me now with that same bright, unsettling, interest as he spreads his ringed hands toward Petros.

"The isles are full of such tales. It seems unkind to hound the empress for a keen instinct, my lord, when the old stories would have called it a blessing. Surely we can allow a woman her good sense without calling her a witch for it."

It sounds like a defense.

It is dressed as a defense.

But his eyes never leave my face, and I understand that Lord Basileus has not taken my side at all, but has simply found a more elegant way to ask the same question Petros asked.

I keep my face still. It is the hardest thing I have done all day.

And then, because I am tired of being the one questioned, I decide to take the initiative myself. It is the first time I have heard anyone but Theron speak of beast-songs, and I will not let it pass.

"Tell me, my lord," I say. "Is it your habit to accuse a woman of sorcery for the crime of paying attention? Or only when the woman is northern?"

A few of the watching nobles make small sounds at that, and Petros's jaw tightens. For the length of a breath I think I may have won this discussion outright.

But I have never been able to leave a question alone, and there is one here worth more to me than winning. So I reach for it.

“But I confess I am curious,” I say, more honestly than is wise. “You speak of these stories as though the whole hall knows them, and I do not. I was not raised on beast-songs in the north. What do the old tales actually say? Where are the songs meant to come from?”

Petros shrugs, already bored of a subject that is not frightening me the way he had hoped. “I could not tell you the particulars. I only know them the way anyone does. Old wives' talk, nurses hushing children at dusk, do not wander past the tree line or the voices will have you. There is no book about it. It is not that kind of knowing.”

“There is a version in the isles,” Basileus offers, “we say the songs are the beasts themselves, calling to one another before a hunt. But my grandmother told it differently. She said the songs were older than the beasts, and that the beasts only learned to answer them.” His coral rings catch the light as he turns his cup. “And that those who could hear the songs were hearing something a great deal older than any beast. Something that did not wish to be heard by just anyone.”

“That is not how I heard it.” This from Lord Varro who responds. “In my province they said the voices came from under the mountains. From a sleeping thing. That the world was built over it like a lid set over a pot, and that in the thin places, where the deep woods meet the old mines, you could still hear it turning in its sleep.” He loses the thread of his own tale, and waves a spotted hand. “Or some such. It has been a very long time. They are only stories.”

Only stories.

Every soul in this hall is so certain of it, so comfortable in their certainty, and I stand among them knowing they are not stories at all. But I say nothing, because saying anything is the one thing I cannot afford to do.

It is then that I realize my silence reads wrong when Varro speaks.

“Oh, look,” Varro says, delighted, to the men at his shoulder. “The northern empress has gone all solemn over the beast-songs. She believes them.” A ripple of laughter, warmer now, crueler. “How charming. They marry us a bride to seal a peace and she turns out to be a superstitious child who jumps at nursery tales. Tell me, Your Majesty, do you leave a bowl of milk out for the fair folk as well?”

The laughter grows, and I feel the flush climb my neck, because I have done it again, walked into the trap with my own two feet, let them turn my curiosity into proof that I am exactly the foolish foreign girl they wished me to be. Melina's hand finds my sleeve. Xanthe has gone very still, gathering herself for something that will cost the room.

And Petros, sensing the hall has warmed to him at last, gathers the laughter up and sharpens it into the thing he came here to say.

“Forgive us, Empress. We are unkind.” He does not sound sorry at all. “But you must understand how it looks. Let us speak plainly, since you value plain speech.”

“A woman comes to us out of the north, from the hand of the very man who has bled this empire for five years. She rides, by chance, to the one town in the south that burns that day, and knows, by chance, to empty it before the wardens stir. And within a month of her arrival, her father's banners move at the Pass of Arryndale, where they have not moved in a year.” He spreads his hands, playing the reasonable man, playing to the whole listening hall now. “Chance upon chance upon chance. I do not say she is a spy. I would not be so uncourteous. I say only that a wise court does not stake its peace on a run of such remarkable luck, and that perhaps it is time this one was watched a little more closely, and humored a little less. For the good of the emperor. For the good of us all. Surely no loyal empress would object to that.”

It is well done. I can hear that it is well done, the way he has turned a hall of murmurs into something that is nodding, the way he has wrapped a knife in concern for Theron and made refusing it look like guilt. Melina has gone still beside me. Even Xanthe's mouth is a hard line. He has built the thing too well, and the worst part is that I do not know how to unbuild it because some of it is true.

"I wonder," says a voice from the doorway, "that so many great lords have nothing better to do than trouble my wife."

The hall moves like a field of wheat under wind, every head turning, every spine straightening, and there in the great doors is Theron. The shadows in the hall lean toward him the way they always do, and Petros's reasonable face goes the color of his own wine.

Theron does not hurry.

He never hurries.

Instead he crosses the hall with his hands behind his back and the whole room rearranging itself around him. He does not look at Petros, he looks at me, once, a flick of gold that checks me over the way it did in the market square, and then he turns to the lord who has spent the last quarter hour trying to unmake me.

“Go on,” Theron says softly. “You were advising my court to watch my wife. I would like to hear the rest. Say it to me, since it is my peace you are so concerned for.”

“Your Majesty.” Petros bows, deep now, all the ease gone out of him. “I meant only—”

“You meant to stand in my hall and name my empress a threat, without the courage to use the word.” Theron's voice cuts him off.

It is only then that I see the shadows pooling towards the nearest lords and wrapping around their ankles, and when they try to step back they find they are unable to. Fear instantly forms across their faces as Theron speaks.

“My wife's loyalties are mine to question, Petros. Not yours." The shadows deepen at his feet. "Concern yourself with my empress again, and I will begin to wonder what a wine-lord hopes to gain by turning my court against her. Do not make me wonder if you wish to keep your head intact.”

The shadows around the other nobles recoil then and spread across the floor as Theron then addresses the other nobles.

“Do not mistake my patience for permission. My empress loyaty is not up for discussion in this court. If the north stirs at the Pass, I will meet it there. If anyone speaks ill of my wife again, they will find my shadows waiting for them.”

Theron then turns back to the court and then back to Petros.

“Have I made myself clear?’

Petros has gone gray. “Quite clear, Your Majesty.”

“Good.” Theron turns from him as though he has ceased to exist, and offers me his arm, in front of the whole hall. “Empress. The petitions are waiting. Sit with me.”

I take his arm. It is the first time I have touched him since the night his hand was at my throat, and I feel the whole hall watching me do it.

I feel what his offered arm says to every soul in the room, that whatever I am, I am his, and he has decided it in front of all of them.

“Thank you,” I murmur, only for him, as he leads me toward the dais.

“Do not thank me,” he says, just as low. “You had already won it before I walked in. I merely ended it.” He glances down at me, and there is something in his gold eyes that is almost warm. “A nursery story. I shall have to remember that one.”

And I feel it climb up my throat before I can stop it, wildly inappropriate, entirely unwilling to be stopped, a small helpless huff of something that has not happened to me in a very long time in a room full of people.

I laugh.

Behind us, I hear Melina exhale, and Lykos murmur something to her that makes her stifle a sound, and somewhere Xanthe is no doubt already deciding which of these lords will most regret speaking so ill of me today. And Aodh, who has been under a bench this whole time being a very ordinary fox, trots out to fall in at my heel as though he has been managing all of it from the start.

It is not a victory. Petros will keep instigating things no doubt. Basileus is still watching me with those bright eyes. He gave me something though. A word to go off of.

Beast-songs.

It seems I will have to look more into the folk stories told in the south. But as I walk beside my husband I can’t help but think of how I had to lie to protect myself. Of how somewhere far north a letter with my mother's failing hand is waiting to remind me whose daughter I still am.

I walked into a court of knives.

I walked out on my husband's arm, uncut, and that will do, for today.