Moonlight lay across the reflecting pool in a sheet of pale silver, and on that silver floated a man in pale silk.
Nereida Vashen saw him before she recognized him. She had come down from the upper terrace to clear her head, her slippers whispering against the old stone, the jasmine along the south wall exhaling its heavy sweetness into the warm dark. The garden was hers at this hour. It had been hers for months, since Corin began his nights elsewhere and the servants learned to walk softly past her door.
The body lay face-up. One arm trailed over the pool's lip, fingers curled as though still reaching for something. His doublet was unfastened at the throat. His lips were the color of a bruise left on white cloth.
Violet. The unmistakable violet of nightveil.
Nereida stopped at the pool's edge. The water barely rippled. Somewhere behind her, a frog clicked once and fell silent.
"Corin." His name came out of her before she could stop it, a breath rather than a word. She did not kneel. She did not touch him. She stood very still and looked, because looking was the thing she had been trained to do, and training held where feeling failed.
The reflection of the palace windows stared back at her from the water's surface, long and broken by the shape between them. The torchlight on the colonnade made Corin's pale hair look almost gold. From this distance, if one did not know the stillness, one might have mistaken him for a man lounging at the pool's edge after too much wine.
Nereida knew stillness. She had learned to read it in the flicker of an eyelid, the pause between breaths. The chest that did not rise. The lips that did not move. Corin was not lounging. Corin was not breathing. The nightveil had done its work, and the work was tidy.
She inhaled. Jasmine. Wet stone. The faint copper tang that lives at the back of every violent death, even when the death is slow. She catalogued these things the way her father had taught her to catalogue a battlefield, by smell first, by sight second, by the small betrayals the body leaves behind.
His hands. The right hand was empty. The left, the one that trailed into the water, still held something. She leaned closer. A folded square of paper, pale green, the color the court used for notes meant to be read by candlelight and then burned. The corner of it had gone soft and translucent in the water.
She did not reach for it. Not yet. Once she touched the scene, she was no longer the discoverer of a thing. She was part of it.
"Guards," she said, and her voice came out flat and carrying, the way she'd been taught to pitch it across a noisy room. "Guards at the south terrace. Now."
The nearest torch guttered in a breath of wind. The frog was silent. The palace, which had been murmuring with the small sounds of a household settling into its late hours, held its breath.
She heard the boots first. Two sets, coming at speed along the colonnade. Then the clatter of a halberd against stone as one of the men fumbled to present arms. Sergeant Tovan came around the corner with his lamp held high, and the lamplight fell on the pool and on what floated in it, and Tovan stopped as though he had walked into a wall.
"Gods preserve us," he said.
"Send for my father," Nereida said. "Send for the imperial watcher. Send no one else. Do you understand me, Sergeant? No one. Else."
Tovan's mouth opened. Closed. He was a man who had served House Vashen through two wars and one peace that had cost the house most of its southern holdings. He knew the shape of a command when he heard one.
"My lady." He bowed, which was not his habit, and went.
Nereida stayed where she was. The paper in Corin's hand had slipped a finger's width deeper into the water. She watched it sink.
She had not loved her brother as the songs said siblings ought to love one another. That kind of love was a thing bred into ballads and bred out of high houses. Corin had been the heir. She had been the spare. He had been taught to ride and command and charm. She had been taught to read ledgers and count the cost of a smile. They had shared a nursery and not much else, and as they grew older they had shared less.
But he had been hers. That was the thing people outside the great houses never quite understood. The heir of a high house belongs to everyone. The spare belongs to the family. Whatever Corin had been to the court, to the Emperor, to the four families who measured their daughters against his name, to Nereida he had been a brother in the way that the word was used within walls like these: a piece of one's own fortune, a thing one could not sell without selling oneself.
She watched the paper sink until it disappeared into the dark below the lily pads.
Lord Halrek Vashen arrived faster than a man of sixty should have been able to move. He came around the colonnade with his cloak still half-fastened and his boots still mudded from the kennels, and the lamplight caught the old scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his jaw. He had not been abed. He had been walking the lower garden with his hound, and the hound was not with him now.
He stopped at the pool's edge and looked down at his elder son. The lamp shook in the guard's hand. Halrek did not shake.
"Nereida." His voice was the rough northern thing it had always been, softened only by the years and the cost of holding a frontier for two decades. "How long."
"I do not know. I found him as I came down the terrace."
"You did not touch him."
"No."
"Why."
She met his eyes. He had taught her to read a room the way a captain reads a coast. She had learned.
"Because I did not know what would be lost, and I did not want to lose it."
For a long moment, her father said nothing. The frog began again, somewhere out in the dark water, clicking its small insistent rhythm. The jasmine kept breathing. Somewhere in the palace, a door opened and closed.
"Clever girl," Halrek said, and the words were not quite a compliment and not quite a warning. He turned to Tovan. "The imperial watcher. Where."
"Riding from the lower gate, my lord. Quarter hour, no more."
"See that it is no more. See that no one enters the south garden until I say. See that the household is woken quietly and assembled in the long hall. Move."
Tovan moved. The boots retreated along the colonnade, and the garden settled back into its old quiet.
Nereida watched her father look at the body. She had seen him look at the bodies of men he had sent into the field, men who had come home in carts. The look was the same. A man taking inventory of what was owed and what was now owed to him.
"His sword is missing," Halrek said.
Nereida looked. The belt was still buckled at Corin's waist, but the scabbard hung empty against his hip, the leather gaping. She had not noticed. Her father had.
"Stolen," she said.
"Or taken. By him, before. Or after. By someone who wished it found, or by someone who did not."
The lamp in the guard's hand had steadied. The light lay across Corin's face now without trembling, and the violet on his lips looked, in that steady light, almost painted.
"Father."
"Say it."
"Nightveil is not a quick poison."
"No."
"It takes time. He would have felt it working. He would have had time to walk, to send for help, to reach his own chambers."
"Yes."
"He did not."
"No."
Nereida looked at the empty scabbard. She looked at the paper that had sunk. She looked at the lily pads and the silver water and the windows of the palace staring back at her from below.
"He came here," she said. "He chose the pool. He chose to die in the garden."
Halrek said nothing.
"Why would he choose the garden?"
The old man turned from the water and looked at his younger daughter with the slow, measuring look he had given battlefields and treaties and the faces of men who had come to ask him for things.
"Because the garden is where the watchers do not see," he said. "Because the garden has no ears in the walls. Because the garden is the only place in this palace that is not the Emperor's."
Nereida drew a breath that tasted of jasmine and copper.
"And because," Halrek said, "the garden has a gate that opens onto the river path. The path that runs under the south wall. The path the smugglers use. The path that no guard will speak of."
"You think he took his own life."
"I think the garden will tell us one of two things, and only one of two things, before morning." He held up a finger, the knuckle scarred from an old war. "Either Corin walked into this garden, took the nightveil of his own will, and lay down in the water to die like a poet in a song. Or someone brought him here already dead and arranged him as though he had."
"And which do you believe?"
"I believe," her father said, "that the imperial watcher is a man named Maren who has served the Emperor for longer than you have been alive, and that Maren will believe whichever story requires the least trouble for the crown."
Nereida looked at her brother's body. The water had begun to lap very softly at the stones of the pool's edge, as though the pool itself were drawing a breath.
"Then we must know which it is," she said, "before Maren does."
Halrek put his hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he had touched her in months. His palm was rough and cold and smelled of dog and iron.
"Yes," he said. "We must."
A horn sounded, low and distant, from the direction of the lower gate. The imperial watcher had arrived.
The garden, which had held its peace for the space of a single conversation, gave it up.
Maren did not walk so much as arrive. Nereida heard him before she saw him: the measured tread of boots polished to a black mirror, the soft clink of ceremonial chain, the whisper of silk against steel. Then he came around the stand of white roses and stopped, and the garden seemed to take a step backward from him.
He was not a large man. He was worse. He was the kind of man whose stillness made the air around him feel caged. His face was narrow and sallow, the color of old parchment, and his eyes were the pale grey of river water in winter. He wore the Emperor's grey, which was not a color at all but an absence of color, and at his throat hung the small obsidian seal that meant he spoke with the Emperor's own tongue.
"Lord Vashen," Maren said. His voice was flat, uninflected, the voice of a man who had learned to use as few words as the law allowed. "My condolences. The morning is early, and I have come at the Emperor's command."
Halrek inclined his head. The gesture was correct, exactly correct, and that was the first time Nereida understood her father might be afraid.
"My daughter Nereida," Halrek said. "She found him."
Maren's gaze moved to her. It did not linger. It measured.
"You are the second child," he said. "The strategist. You read the old campaigns."
"I have read the old campaigns, my lord watcher."
"Tell me what you see."
Nereida had been composing her answer since she had knelt by the pool. She had turned it over in her mind, sentence by sentence, and she had decided what she would say and what she would not. Now she said it.
"I see a young man of twenty-three who has just been jilted by the woman he meant to marry," she said. "I see a garden arranged for lovers. I see the nightveil in his hand, the cup beside him, the water on his sleeve and not on his knees. I see a ribbon from the lady's favor caught on the stone. And I see that the gate to the river path is unlatched."
Maren did not look at the gate. He looked at her.
"You are thorough," he said.
"It is my nature."
"And what do you conclude?"
"I conclude that the truth will not be simple, my lord watcher."
"Truth is never simple," Maren said. "That is why the Emperor employs men like me." He paused. "You will attend the Obsidian Court when it convenes. Both of you. The body will be moved under guard. Lord Areneth will be summoned, and so will his daughter. The Emperor wishes this matter settled before the festival begins."
He turned, and two imperial attendants came forward with a litter. Nereida did not watch them lift her brother. She watched her father instead. Halrek stood very still, his hands loose at his sides, and on his face was the look of a man who had just heard a sentence of war and was already counting the cost of it.
The Obsidian Court was not a court in the sense that the word was commonly used. It was a room, and the room was a weapon. It was cut into the side of the imperial hill so that no window looked out upon the city, and the walls were sheathed in black stone that had been polished until it reflected the people inside it like a dark mirror. When Nereida entered, she saw herself four times over, and the Nereidas in the glass all had the same expression, and the expression was not her own.
The Emperor sat at the far end of the room, on a chair that was not a throne. He had made a point of that. The chair was simple, made of dark wood, and it was slightly too small for him. Emperor Aldric Solvaine was a tall man, and he had the look of a man who had been tired for a very long time and had decided that the tiredness was a kind of armor. His hair was iron-grey and cut short. His hands were long and clean. He wore no crown. He did not need one.
To his left, on a lower seat, sat Prince Sable Solvaine. Sable was nineteen and sharp-featured and he had his father's eyes, which were the color of slate in shadow. He was watching the door when Nereida came in, and when he saw her, he did not look away. He held her gaze for a moment, then inclined his head, the smallest possible acknowledgment, and she returned it with the same precision. They had known each other since they were children, and they had long since agreed that whatever was between them was not to be displayed in rooms like this.
To the Emperor's right, in a chair that was more ornate than his own, sat Lord Areneth. He was a broad man, red-haired, with the florid face of someone who drank well and slept badly. His daughter Thessaly sat behind him, veiled, a pale smudge of silk in the black room. She did not look up.
Halrek was already there. He stood to one side, near a brazier that had been lit against the chill of the stone. He looked older than he had at the garden. He looked as though the walk from the carriage to this room had taken ten years off his life and put twenty on.
Nereida took her place beside him. The attendants at the door closed them in, and the silence in the room became a kind of pressure.
The Emperor spoke.
"We are here," he said, "because a young man is dead, and because the houses of this realm are not so steady that the death of a young man can be permitted to fester into a quarrel. I will hear what is to be heard. I will ask what is to be asked. And I will not have this court become a theatre for grief. We have had enough theatre."
His gaze moved to Maren. "The watcher."
"My Emperor." Maren stepped forward. "Lord Corin Vashen, heir to House Vashen, was found this morning in the moon garden of his father's estate, in a pool fed by a thermal spring. The water in the pool was warm. The body was cool. The physician of the household has examined the body and reports that the young lord died between the second hour after midnight and the fourth. There was no wound upon him. There was nightveil in his hand and a cup beside him, and the cup was empty."
"And the nightveil?"
"Was of the kind that is sold by the apothecaries of the lower city. It is not a rare poison. It is not a common one. It is a thing one must ask for by name."
The Emperor's gaze shifted to Lord Areneth. "My lord of Areneth. You understand why you have been summoned."
Lord Areneth rose. He was a man who filled a room the way a barrel fills a cellar, and he filled this one with the particular energy of a man who knew he had been insulted and intended to be insulted well.
"I understand," he said, "that I have been summoned because my daughter's name has been spoken in connection with the death of a young man who was once contracted to marry her. I understand that the court wishes me to weep, or to defend, or to threaten. I will do none of those things. I will say only this. My daughter did not love Corin Vashen. My daughter was glad when the contract was broken. My daughter has been in her chambers since the feast of the summer solstice, and the household can confirm it. If the Emperor wishes to send the watchers to confirm it, he may. If the Emperor wishes to question my daughter, he may. But I will not have her name dragged through this court as though she were a piece of meat thrown to the hounds."
"Sit down, Areneth," the Emperor said, and his voice was not unkind. "No one is dragging anyone's name. We are here to find out what happened to a young man who is dead, and we are here to do it before the sun sets, because the festival begins tomorrow and because the realm cannot afford to be entertaining the wrong thoughts while the ambassadors are in the city."
Areneth sat. The chair creaked under him. Thessaly, behind the veil, did not move.
The Emperor turned to Halrek. "Lord Vashen. You have the floor."
Nereida had known her father for thirty years, and she had never seen him look the way he looked now. The war general was gone. The peace broker was gone. In his place stood a man who had just lost the son he had spent twenty-three years building, and who was about to lose something else, something Nereida could not yet see the shape of.
"My Emperor," Halrek said, "my son is dead. I will not stand here and perform the grief of a father. I will only say that my son was not the sort of man who would take his own life over a broken contract, and that the gate to the river path was unlatched when my daughter found him. I leave the rest to the watchers and to the wisdom of the court."
"Lord Vashen," the Emperor said, and now his voice was colder. "I did not ask you for the grief of a father, nor did I ask you for the politics of a lord. I asked you for the truth. Did your son take his own life, or was he murdered?"
Halrek did not answer. The silence in the room deepened, and Nereida understood in that moment what her father was about to do. She understood it the way a chess player understands a move before the hand has finished lifting the piece.
She took a step forward. "My Emperor."
The Emperor's eyes moved to her. They were pale and patient, and they did not blink.
"Lord Vashen is not refusing to answer," she said. "He is making a calculation. I will make the calculation for him. My brother Corin was not the sort of man who would take his own life. He was rash, he was reckless, and he was, in his way, too much in love with the world to leave it. If he is dead, then someone helped him along, and that someone is not in this room unless the river path runs under the floor."
"That is an accusation," Areneth said.
"It is a fact," Nereida said. "Lord Areneth, I am not accusing your house. I am accusing the river path. I am accusing the gate that was unlatched. I am accusing the nightveil that is not rare and not common, and I am accusing the fact that no one in this household heard a young man of twenty-three walk through a moonlit garden to his death."
The Emperor leaned back in his chair. The chair creaked. The black walls gave back the sound as though they were storing it.
"Very well," he said. "The court will hear the watchers' report. It will hear the physician. It will hear the household guard. It will hear the testimony of Lord Areneth's daughter, if she will give it. And it will hear the testimony of the household of Lord Vashen, beginning with the second child, who has just made a small speech and who, I suspect, has a larger one in her."
He looked at her, and the weariness in his eyes was not a weakness. It was a blade that had been sharpened so many times it had become a part of him.
"Begin," he said.
The black room waited. The reflections in the black walls waited. Thessaly, behind her veil, did not move. Sable, on the low seat, watched Nereida with the same expression he had worn when she had walked in, and the expression had not softened.
Nereida drew a breath. The air in the room tasted of stone and iron and of the smoke from the brazier, and underneath it, faint and strange, the ghost of jasmine from the garden they had all left behind.
She opened her mouth to speak, and at that moment the doors of the Obsidian Court opened, and a man in a grey cloak walked in, and the man in the grey cloak was not Maren, and the man in the grey cloak was not anyone she had been told to expect.
The grey cloak fell open at the shoulders, and beneath it the man wore a breastplate of blackened steel, and on the breastplate there was no sigil, and the absence of a sigil was louder than any sigil would have been. He walked with the loose economy of a man who had been taught to kill in corridors. His face was broad and unhandsome and utterly forgettable, and that forgettability was the most carefully constructed part of him.
He did not bow to the Emperor.
The Emperor, to Nereida's surprise, did not seem to expect him to.
"Cousin," the Emperor said, and the word was a door opened onto a darker room.
"Cousin," the grey man said, and his voice was unhurried, and his eyes went past the Emperor to Thessaly, and to Sable, and finally to Nereida. He did not look at Lord Halrek. The grey man looked at Nereida the way a locksmith looks at a lock, assessing the pins before deciding which would give first.
"You are early," the Emperor said.
"I am never early," the grey man said. "I am precisely when I choose to be. The difference is not always visible to those who have not learned to read clocks the way I do." He produced a folded paper from inside his cloak and set it on the table without waiting to be asked. The paper was the color of old bone. "A letter for the court. From an interested party. The seal is one you will recognize, and the contents are one you will not enjoy."
The Emperor did not touch the letter. He looked at it the way a man looks at a dish he suspects has been poisoned by a cook he cannot afford to dismiss.
"Thessaly," he said. "Read it aloud. You have the steadier voice for bad news."
Thessaly rose. She did not rise quickly. She rose with the measured grace of a woman who understood that haste, in a room like this, was a confession. Her veil caught the light from the brazier as she crossed to the table, and the light slid across the silk and was swallowed.
She broke the seal. The seal was a black crow holding a broken key in its beak, pressed into green wax, and the wax crumbled under her thumb with the brittle sweetness of something that had been waiting a long time to be opened. She unfolded the paper. She read.
"To the Emperor Aldric Solvaine, greetings. To Lord Halrek Vashen, condolences on the loss of a son you were seen to love. To Prince Sable Solvaine, who is not yet the man his father is, and who should be careful which ledgers he audits. To the young woman of House Vashen who is about to say something that will cost her more than she knows, be advised that I have already paid for the next three sentences she will speak, and that the price of the fourth is being negotiated as you listen. I am the Crow. I have funded the gardens your Emperor pretends not to see. I have paid the physicians your Emperor pretends to trust. I have signed the marriage contracts your Emperor pretends did not need his signature to be valid. I am the silence in your records. I am the donor whose name does not appear. And I am writing now because the boy who fell into the fountain last night was mine before he was yours, and I would like him back."
Thessaly's voice did not waver. Thessaly's voice was the most disciplined instrument in the room, and she played it now with the cold precision of a woman who understood that the letter had been written for her to read aloud, that the reading was the point, and that her tone would be studied for any crack.
She finished. The room did not move.
The grey man stood with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the Emperor and the patience of a man who had set a fuse and was content to wait for the spark to find it.
"Cousin," the Emperor said, and the word was no longer a door. It was a wall. "You were seen."
"Cousin," the grey man said. "I am always seen. I am seen when it is useful, and I am unseen when it is useful. Tonight it is useful that I be seen delivering this letter in your own court, before your own heir, before the woman whose testimony you have just invited. The Benefactor wished you to know that the letter exists. The Benefactor wished the room to know. The Benefactor, in fact, wished me to be the one to deliver it, because the Benefactor understands the theatre of small things, and you, cousin, are a man who has always understood it too."
The Emperor's hand, the one resting on the table, did not move. The knuckles did not whiten. Nereida watched the Emperor's hand the way a sailor watches a rope in a gale, looking for the first tremor that meant it was about to give.
"You will tell me who the Crow is," the Emperor said.
"I will not," the grey man said, pleasantly. "I will tell you that the Crow is not a man, exactly, though the man who signs the letters exists. I will tell you that the Crow is a structure, the way a bridge is a structure, and that structures are not arrested by warrants. I will tell you that the Crow is interested in the marriage that is to be discussed this week between Lord Vashen's heir and Prince Sable, and that the Crow has opinions about the dowry, and that those opinions will be made known in a manner of his choosing, at a time of his choosing, in a place that will not be this one." He paused. "I will also tell you that the young woman is to be conveyed to the Crow tonight, under the terms of a debt her father incurred, and that this conveyance is not optional, and that the Emperor's court is not, in this particular, the Emperor's."
Nereida's breath stopped. The jasmine in the air thickened. The reflections in the black walls seemed to lean in, the way a crowd leans in at the edge of a fall.
"My daughter," Lord Halrek said, and his voice was a northern wall against a northern sea. "Is not a debt to be called in by a man who hides behind a hood."
"The hood is not a hiding," the grey man said. "The hood is a habit. The Crow has worn it for thirty years. The Crow wore it when he paid for the education of the young woman in question, who is, I assure you, very well educated, and who is, as of this hour, in a position to discharge the obligation her father incurred by accepting that education on her behalf." He turned, finally, to Lord Halrek, and his eyes were the color of wet stone. "Lord Vashen. I was told to be gentle with you, and I have been instructed to convey the Crow's sympathy for the loss of your son, who was a man of considerable, and as yet unspent, promise."
Lord Halrek's face did not change. Lord Halrek's face had been set in the same line for the better part of forty years, and the line did not know how to soften.
"My daughter," Lord Halrek said again, "does not leave this room."
"That," the grey man said, "is not within your authority to determine."
The room held its breath. The brazier popped. The sound was small and loud, the way a single drop is small and loud when it falls into a well.
The Emperor leaned forward. The chair creaked. The black walls gave back the creak.
"Cousin," he said, and the word was a knife drawn slowly from a sheath, "you are in my court. You have delivered a letter from a man who claims to have bought my empire from under me, and you have done so in the presence of my heir, and you have done so while my guards stand outside the door and do not know whether to enter. You will tell me who the Crow is, or you will tell me where the Crow is, or you will tell me why I should permit you to leave this room breathing."
The grey man inclined his head. The courtesy was perfect. The courtesy was a weapon.
"Cousin," he said, "the Crow is in this room. The Crow has been in this room since before you sat down. The Crow is not a man. The Crow is the position you have been too proud to fill and too tired to abdicate. The Crow is the work that the empire does when the emperor is asleep. The Crow has been signing your warrants for twenty years, cousin. The Crow has been endorsing your appointments. The Crow has been the pen that moves when you set it down."
He paused. The pause was the size of a held blade.
"And the Crow," he said, "is the young woman of House Vashen."
The room did not move. The room was a held blade of a different kind.
Nereida heard the words the way a diver hears the water close over her head, after the first bright cold of it, in the longer silence that follows. Her hands were at her sides. Her hands were steady. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had been training, since the age of nine, to be the second child of a house that did not need a second child, and who had discovered, in the training, a vocation that the house had not anticipated.
She did not look at the Emperor. She looked at the grey man. The grey man looked back. His face was the same broad, unhandsome, forgettable face, and in it she read the offer that had been made to her, at fifteen, in a study in the southern wing of this very palace, by a man in a hood, who had offered her books and teachers and the right to ask questions that the daughters of great houses were not, as a rule, permitted to ask. She had accepted. She had signed. She had understood, at fifteen, that the signature was not ink, and that the debt was not a debt, and that the man in the hood was not a man but a position, and that the position would, in time, be hers.
"I have been the Crow," she said, and her voice was smooth and slight and the smallest sound in the room, "since I was fifteen years old. My brother did not fall into the fountain last night. My brother was removed, because my brother had begun to ask the same questions I had been hired to ask, and because my brother was not, by temperament, suited to the kind of silence that the work requires. The Crow did not kill him. The Crow had him taken, and the Crow had him placed in the fountain, and the Crow had the physician prepared to say what the physician said, and the Crow had the watchers prepared to see what the watchers saw. The Crow is grieved. The Crow is also, as a matter of policy, continuing."
Lord Halrek made a sound. The sound was not a word. The sound was the noise a wall makes when the keystone is taken out.
She did not look at her father. She looked at the Emperor.
"Your Majesty," she said, "I am ready to answer your questions. I am ready to tell you, in the order you prefer, which of your appointments I have endorsed and which I have not, which of your warrants I have signed and which I have allowed to lapse, and which of your records contain the corrections I have made at the cost of my own sleep. I am ready to be examined. I am also ready, if you prefer, to be conveyed to the Crow's holding, where I will continue the work under a new signatory, and where your court will not have the satisfaction of judging me."
The Emperor looked at her for a long time. The weariness in his eyes had not left. The weariness had been joined, now, by a colder thing, and the colder thing was respect, and the respect was a kind of grief.
"You are very young," he said, "to be what you say you are."
"I am twenty-two, Your Majesty," she said. "The age at which the second child of a great house is, by tradition, allowed to begin her own accounting."
The Emperor looked at the grey man. The grey man looked at the Emperor. Between them, in the space of a glance, a treaty was drafted and signed and broken and signed again, and the treaty had to do with which of them would be permitted, in the morning, to be alive.
"Take her," the Emperor said, and the words were a stone set down on a scale. "Convey her to the Crow's holding. She will not be tried in this court. She will not be executed in this court. She will be returned to the position from which she came, and the position will be examined, and the examination will be conducted by my son, who has not yet learned to read clocks the way his cousin does, and who will, I suspect, learn."
Sable rose from the low seat. The motion was the first he had made in some minutes. He looked at Nereida, and for the first time since she had known him, she could not read his face.
"You will come with me," he said.
"Yes," she said.
She turned to her father. Lord Halrek stood where he had stood since the letter had been read. His face had not changed. His face had been broken in a place she could not see, and the break was the kind that does not show in the lines of a man's face but in the way a man stands, and her father was standing now as though the ground had shifted under him by an inch, and the inch was enough.
"Father," she said. "I will write."
He did not answer. He inclined his head. The inclination was the smallest possible courtesy. It was also, she understood, the largest possible permission.
She walked out of the Obsidian Court between the grey man and the prince, and the doors closed behind her, and the black walls gave back the sound of the closing, and the sound was stored, and somewhere in the storage there was a record of every door that had ever closed in that room, and the records were patient, and the records were kept by women who had learned to write in a hand that did not tremble, and the women were, in the morning, to be audited.