Still, his wife made sure to put him in their company. In turn, he made certain his children attended him at every juncture, as much distraction for him as for them to learn.
This, all of this, was his wife’s doing, however. “The best measure to win a place is to distract its people with light so bright they cannot even hope to see the dark,” she said. The ceremonies in the palace were echoed in the streets, where the littlefolk would bask in bawdier revelry, and the Church cried out his name, and every merchant for miles descended for the chances of a lifetime.
In these days, he had met so many people he thought his eyes would surely soon begin to bleed. Foreign dignitaries had borne gifts of gold and silver and ships, and one—some Tajali fool, no doubt—had even brought them tigers. “One woman, one man,” he had said, a little smile tugging at his dark face. “Being as it is right.” Leopold had taken them with awe, and his wife with grace.
In truth, he could not abide the Tajali. Eastern fools, nigh as low as Zuti. Traders and abacus-men, all. Best they be back to their donkeys and their elephants, where they still claimed some heathen dog for god. Assal, they cried, the great devil—well, if it were so, he would send them to Him one day.
Dukes and counts and barons, priests and merchants of the highest order—all had come into his city at the height of the greatest trains, following him first to the church at Blassenberg, then through the capital’s ancient gates for the festivities. So many names and faces he had never known, and wanted even less to ever know, but all praised him in equality, and all made the days what they could, such that at times, he felt there was nowhere left to breathe. Every inch of his palace seemed filled with some fawning face, and the streets, though broader, would be no less cutthroat in the honor.
Even common guild masters came to him—and he could not but wonder why the peerless should speak to him, for it seemed a task for one of his simpering ministers—and they bowed low, even as they sought to rob him blind. This one sought reparations for a flooded port. This other reminded him of debts so soon to due. “Remind me,” he told a duke—his young cousin as it turned, the Duke of Dexet—“who makes demands of an emperor?” And they slunk away, all very good ser, yes ser, very good ser.
Nobles danced about him. The older ones, they spoke of his father and the war, lost in what was. The younger, they groped him and they measured him in histories all the same. They chattered at trade and dispositions, flattering, flattering, until he heard nothing but chattering.
He knew the game. But he was too tired to play it. Would have told them all to stuff it if he might, but his wife would surely end him.
Only a handful of nobles had not attended, and these were perhaps the only ones whose names he did remember. Cullick being foremost among them. Sara and that bitch Surelia close behind. Loved or not, such days were supposed to be for relatives—for family—as much as anything else. That sister and Empress Dowager both had seen fit to snub his ceremonies, well, tongues would wag. Already they did, for what had come instead: the crowing of binds to come between that one’s whelp and a Cullick whore. Done precise, no doubt, to sap some mirth from his grand day, for it arrived at just a goodly time.
Hold mirth tight against your breast, but answer every injury with bladed heart, Zelnig had once told him. A lesson he never forgot.
Instead, he drowned his bitterness in wine and focused on life’s little pleasures. His daughter squealed as he bounced her on his knee, and his wife made a dancing fool of their son. Emperors and empresses. That is what they would be one day. He knew it to be true.
But outside, the hour grew late, and the stars dark. All pleasures had their end, shame as that was to admit. He loomed over his daughter and wondered: How much do you and your mother share?
“Have you done as papa asked?” Fiore nodded eagerly. “Have you played nice? And have you watched?”
The little girl stared upward, toward the light, before blushing into a smile. Her head shook far too fervently from side-to-side. “It’s hardest to see when everyone’s around.”
“You will be fierce, I think, when you are older,” he said with a laugh. “Will you eat for me, before you go to bed?”
“Don’t want to eat. Don’t want bed. I want to play!”
He held her just a little longer, before he offered both sweetlings up to Bertold. He would see them fed and off to bed, and there would be one less worry to Leopold’s evening. All the same, he watched them go with a gentle smile, to know such bliss could be given. That was the true secret of life’s circles, so far as he was concerned.
A touch upon his arm drew him back, to wife and to duty. She plucked him from reverie and pulled him toward the floor. “Duty ever beckons, my lord. Let us have the measure of it before we turn to pleasure.”
* *
All people are bound, in their way. Some are bound by bonds of blood, and others coin, and the multitude might as well be bound by steel, whether oath-borne or readily borne against them.
For Charlotte, the bounds of hearth and home were supposed to be the all-encompassing. The only oaths that mattered. All other things were fleeting. Even the power they scrabbled for was less necessity, and more a means—a means to the family’s end. Every decision was supposed to advance that end. If they did not, then they were poor decisions altogether.
They were playing the long game. So when Charlotte looked back and thought a while on the moons that had passed since she had taken it upon herself to snap the bonds of Isaak’s imprisonment—the physical bonds, at least—the patient woman in her cautioned ease. Neither sign nor sound of the wayward Matair had graced her ears—and how she hunted for a sign!—but so it was.
She had to tell herself that Isaak was a hunter, and hunters had a habit for taking their time. Not to mention she had not exactly equipped the man before she set him to his task. Perfection took time.
But she preferred to see her puppets dance. Call her vain, or impatient, or what her father would, but if she was going to stick her neck out, she wanted some way to know.
Without, she could but wonder: was it the right idea? The right plan? It was her father’s, in truth—were it her decision she would as well have left the man to his cell—but she was the one he had looked in the eye, nails dug as blades against his daughter’s throat.
A daughter whose life still balanced between those nails.
Laughter drew her off. Isaak’s little daughter, Kana, wove beneath the arms of her watcher—her young aunt Anelise—and tumbled flailing across the floor. Even in captivity, the mind could find its moments. The key was to find other people on which to dwell.
But no, that wasn’t right. One needed only themselves. Reliance bred weakness and weakness could be exploited. Exploitation was one thing she could not abide, though it was the very basis of politics.
Perhaps that more than anything was what upset Charlotte about this whole situation. Not the children. She did not so much mind exploiting others to get her ends, but the thought that her father continued to do the same to her, to make her his pawn, now to games she had never even thought to reach—her nails dug into her leggings and it was an effort not to draw blood. This sort of control was the very reason she had taken that Matair boy to bed in the first place. The very reason the rest of his family now found themselves their guests.
Funny, in its way, how one decision could sweep aside so many little lives.
She leaned against the frame of the door and tilted her head to the children. Anelise lunged, catching the tiny Kana in her arms, and bore her up to excited squeals. Around them, three guards stood at grim attention, already chastised once for lax watch. Little girls the two may have been, but Anelise had nearly smuggled them both out a window. If one of the archers on the wall hadn’t caught sight of them, they might have gotten away.
Or tumbled to their deaths.
Of course, the real trouble of the matter was her own brother. He had been with them at the time. A not-so-humble request from son to father.
Gerold saw children of an age, and he wanted to play. He did not understand the concept of a prisoner—not in their truth. Charlotte had taken care to watch, and she knew the secret of that night’s little venture, but she would not tell her father. For Gerold’s sake.
Children were only children, after all. They still believed in drakkons, and the heroes that quarreled on their mounds of gold. They could be sweet-talked. They could be charmed.
She had taken care to separate them since, restricting the boy to his other friend: dear Emperor-to-be Lothen.
Her future husband. Barely out of swaddling clothes.
“Dwelling on what it may be like?” Sara’s voice rang her out of her disgust.
She twisted with a start, to find Lothen’s half-sister—nearly perched over her shoulder. Sara looked almost childish, hands clutched behind her back, smile spread wide with all the wetness of a candied bite.
Though her brother’s death had addled her, the woman remained a vision at each passing of a glance. Her hair ran in golden waves, and her eyes grew greener pastures than most forests could boast. More than a decade her elder, they might as well have been sisters, so far as she was concerned. Soon enough, they would be.
“On what?”
Sara’s grin split and gleamed. “To have children of your own, silly thing.”
For some reason, the very notion left her bitter. She found herself unable to bite back her retort. “I was not aware a child could beget more children.”
The princess leaned back, her smile fading to a frown.
Charlotte sighed. “Apologies. I find myself vexed of late.”
“As do we all, dear child. Think nothing of it. This is the beauty of marriage. You shall have many years to grow into it.”
As if you would know, Charlotte wanted to cry. This she bit back, however. It would be a step too far. She knew Sara meant well. Fact remained; she had seen her time at the hand of arranged marriages already. Sara Durvalle had, at the tender spinster age of 32 years, outlived two husbands without a child to call her own. The first had gone to plague, merely a year from their wedding day. The second, already her elder by many years, had lasted half a decade more, only to die in his slumber. She had a third, and nominally did still, though the secret to their contentment likely remained in how little they saw of one another.
Some dared to call her a witch for such. Charlotte would have plucked their eyeballs from their sockets, if they had said it to Sara’s face.
Sara slid an arm through the loop of her own and sidled close. Her eyes followed the children, who had paused to sit themselves within a corner, that they might watch this new arrival. Let no one say they are not observant.
“What brings you to these western wings?” Charlotte asked.
“A friend, I suppose.” Sara smiled sweetly back. “And word. Your father seeks for you. Something about your ward.” Her nose scrunched and she gave Charlotte a pointed squeeze. “Speaking of which, why have I never met this ward of yours? I have seen the guards, and caught some whispered words, but surely there is more to her than whispers?”
She sighed. How to even begin. Oh she is nothing. Merely a witch that quests for your own heart’s blood. Best to avoid it entirely.
“There is little to her. An ill child of Banur. She suffers the seizes those old fools call devil’s play. It would break your heart to see.”
“Goodness. I had no idea.” Sara looked legitimately crestfallen. “My deepest sympathies, sweet child.”
You have no idea. Which was reminder enough to sort away for later remembrance. It had been too long since Charlotte had checked up on that girl, but she had taken ill in ways yet stranger still, and Charlotte had done her best to find other matters for attention. Yet word had come, as maids would, that she quieted. That she drew still. Too long, perhaps.
Across from them, the children still watched. Whispering some word of warning, the eldest of the pair rose and started for them. Charlotte flicked an annoyed glance to the guards. They stiffened, but made no motions, lest they guess wrong at her intentions. The girl approached, and Sara leaned forward, deliberately pulling Charlotte along as she made to receive her. The girl stopped a few feet away, crossing her arms over her chest as she stared them down.
“Well aren’t you the sweetest girl-child,” Sara mused.
Nothing like acknowledgement crossed Anelise’s long, skinny face. “Well, aren’t you Durvalle?”
Sweetly, Sara answered, “That I am. You know us, child?”
“I know papa served you true.” The child’s eyes hardened at that, and twisted angrily on Charlotte. “I would know why you give yourself to snakes.”
“Child,” Charlotte snapped out her warning.
Sara let the hurt show plainly on her own fair features. Even that did not diminish her. “A cruel thing to say, dear girl.”
“They killed papa. They sent my brother away. And she…” Anelise’s face scrunched in distaste. “She is to be a princess, yes?”
Sara exchanged a look with Charlotte, a questioning thing, before she turned back to meet the girl’s inquisition. Cocking her head, she gave a most regal lashing of her eyes and said, “That is truth, fair child. By whence did you come of that?”
But the child was as a statue before them. Fearless. It was a look Charlotte felt in the pit of her stomach, for in that moment the child never looked more the ghost of her father. “You know she did things with Rurik.” It was not a question.
Those eyes. That tongue.
There were few times Charlotte honestly considered the worth of striking a child. This was one.
Sara had to stifle a laugh. “Your father did bad things, child. We did what was right before Assal. As to your brothers, I am certain they had good reason.”
“Then you are a fool,” the girl said matter-of-factly. Then she spun on her heel and stomped away, blatantly turning her back on royalty. Others might have struck her for that. Were she a few years older, she might have even faced a blade for that.
Sara let it roll off her shoulders with as little care as she greeted all such darkness. She stood back up and tugged Charlotte with her out the door, calling over her shoulder, “A pleasure to meet you, child!” To which of course, there was no reply.
They were scarcely to the hall before Charlotte let the venom drip. “Still think I long, dear sister?”
“One cannot fault a child for such.”
“They are but little versions of ourselves. If not them, then whom?”
The princess pursed her lips, and for once in her life, guarded her silence well.
As they issued down the hall, trailed by Dartrek and a pair of Sara’s own guardsmen, the scattering of small feet alerted Charlotte immediately to her brother’s presence, long before he could ever to have hoped to flee. She thought of calling out to him as he darted down the corner and into shadow, but she doubted it would have done any good. Children do not learn, she thought bitterly, to the sound of Sara’s muffled giggles.
Neither did she bother to question the red-faced guardsman at attention there just how long the boy had lurked. Gerold had been as a ghost to her since the scolding. Sara’s as well, though in that, she also supposed some childish infatuation factored. Like most his age, he was a creature of the heart. The mind—it factored little into his foolish motions.
That Sara indulged him in this was a pitiful thing, but perhaps, a boon to both their weary souls.
“A shame to think,” Sara added, as they greeted the specter of the boy upon the steps.
“What?”
“Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers.” There was a measure of her deep as diamonds raining down that stayed her there, on the border of things. “Guard him well.”
Perhaps that, she mused, had something to do with her joy at the marriage of friend to brother. What fiercer bond? For friend alone, perhaps, she hoped a lioness would fight for that chi
ld as her own fair cub. But was it fair? Ah, that word again. She hated herself with every use of it. Fair, she had always been taught, had little to do with anything. It was to be stricken from her repertoire, but there it remained, something neither praise nor scorn nor lash could suffice to scourge away.
Was it not fair for the lioness to ask for a lion in turn? Yet all that stood within that den was a bird still fresh from egg, too young to fly, or speak its own fair song. The lioness could not even be serenaded. She was to walk beside him until he could fly.
And then?
Perhaps the lion at the head of them all would ask that lioness to devour the song before it ever might sing. Then, perhaps, the plains would be bared.
They went on in muted character, following their feet to the vaulted terraces, and down the corridors of her father’s labors. It would never be said that Vissering was not a lovely place. It was a manse, first and foremost among its galleys, and a mighty fortress second. When spring bloomed, it bloomed with them, from its crawling vines to the bounty of its petals. The arms of its halls stretched wide the artistry of the Empire’s very best, and revealed to all that power lay not alone in strength of arm, but strength of coin, and brush.
It was a lie, and yet, it was home. She could not help but wonder if she would miss it at the end of days. That it would be gone was not debate—it was fact. Emperors and their brides lived in the hallowed halls of old Anscharde, where the illusions reached the peak of the weaver’s loom. For there, history itself was born, to whatever colors men might wish.
Would it be so different? She thought of the sprawling streets, the markets fresh and full of all the brightest wares in all the land, and she could not help but feel a little sick. They would no longer weave strands into the tapestry, they would become the tapestry, and all the strands would weave into them.
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