The Emperor smiles. It’s a blade across his face, filled with teeth.

The Exalted One, He who was chosen to lead the Faithful, says, “I deny it.”

The speaker drones, tiny silver specks orbiting the Emperor’s head, catch his voice and play it to the thousands gathered. For a heartbeat there’s a shocked hush before the gasps and tittering begin. This is unprecedented! How surprising!

Lord Argan says—stutters, really: “You can’t do that.”

Lee Abiel Serenity crosses his legs and leans back, purring. “Can’t I? There are no rules that say I have to grant an audience if it’s asked.”

The Duke draws a furious breath. “You’re supposed to—”

The Emperor dismisses the speaker drones, so that he can speak to them alone. “Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to do. You were supposed to crawl back into your hole and stay there until you died. Not try to sneak around my refusal of a private audience with this.”

He gestures to the pantomime around him with derisive flicks of the wrist. In his face Misery sees grains of truth from the Duke’s side of the story: the boy Emperor has always wanted the Duke more than the Duke wanted him. He relished having the older man at his beck and call. He saw it as ownership, as he saw most everything else. And he did not take well to being broken up with. One does not leave an emperor before he is ready to leave you.

The viewing galley is a crush of delight and titillation. A duke so humiliated! From Misery’s standpoint it appears a seething wall of cruelty, insurmountable and unbreachable. Seats in the Grand Amphitheater don’t go to just anyone: it’s merchants and financiers and minor nobility having a fine day out. A great day’s entertainment, laughing and sipping cremoline in their air-conditioned seats, watching the poorest and most desperate of the Faithful crawl before the Emperor and beg for his mercy. Their exuberance rings in her ears and heats her blood. Misery’s chest swells with adrenaline, ribs shuddering under the strain.

Unusual movement on the dais. The princess Lee Alodia Lightning finds an opening in the particular sluggishness of shock, and makes her move. She is a saint, she can stonebend, she calls a speaker drone to herself. She addresses the Duke, broadcasting to the Grand Amphitheater and everyone who’s watching. “I’ll hear your plea.”

The audience explodes into a thousand overlapping titters. What a twist, how unexpected! The princess, the invisible little sister, speaking! Defying the natural order of things in front of her brother and grandmother! How dare she! The buzz of their unholy joy burrows into Misery’s body. She is infested by unseemly delight. She imagines it bursting from her skin in tendrils, tearing her from bone to tendon, just like—

The Empress Dowager snaps at her recalcitrant granddaughter: “Child, sit down.”