“I thought as much,” the Matriarch huffed, her eyes narrow with arrogance. Her face was angular and curiously bent, as though it were a thing of clay left too long on one side.

“And why would that be?” Esmenet asked with mock graciousness.

“Who hasn’t heard the rumours?”

“The treason, you mean.”

“The treason, then.”

For a moment the outrageousness of her tone quite escaped Esmenet. So often, it seemed, she forgot her exalted station and discoursed with others as though they were her equals. She found herself blinking in indignation. She hasn’t even condoled me for the loss of my son!

“And what have you heard?”

A calculated pause. Sharacinth’s eyes seemed bred to bovine insolence, her lips to a sour line. “That the White-Luck has turned against the Aspect-Emperor … Against you.”

Esmenet struggled to draw breath around her outrage. Arrogant ingrate! Treacherous old bitch!

Was this what she had imagined all those years ago, sitting on her sill in Sumna, enticing passers-by with a glimpse of the shadows riding up and down her inner thighs? Knowing nothing of power, Esmenet had confused it with its trappings. Ignorance—few things were so invisible. She could remember staring at the coins she had so coveted, those coins that could ward starvation or clothe bruised skin, and wondering at the profile of the man upon them, the Emperor who seemed to stand astride her every bounty and privation. Not hated. Not feared. Not loved. These were passions better spent on his agents. The Emperor himself had always seemed … far too far.

In the endless reveries between beddings, she would sort through everything she could remember, all the lore, inchoate and humbling, that a citizen affixes to the subject of their sovereign. And in her soul’s eye she would see him, Ikurei Xerius III, sitting in this very place.

How could it be possible?

Once, quite on a whim, she had shown Samarmas a silver kellic. “Do you know,” she had asked, pointing to the apparition of her own profile across its face, “who that is?” He had a way of opening his mouth when astounded, as though trying to shape his lips about a nail. It was at once comical—and heartbreaking in that it so clearly betrayed his idiocy.

My son! she silently cried. Picking wounds had become her path of least resistance, the one effortless thing. But there was no escaping the clamour of her responsibilities, the motions she had to force against the grain of what should be overwhelming grief. She had no choice but to have faith in her painted face.

“But you’ve heard more,” she asked in a hard and steady voice—a voice proper to the Empress of the Three Seas. “Haven’t you?”

“More. More,” Sharacinth muttered. “Of course, I’ve heard more. When does one not always hear more? Rumours are like locusts or slaves or rats. They breed indiscriminately.”