Nira snorted. “And the Csestriim bastard best keep it that way. Oshi’d burn him ta ash if he remembered the truth.”
They locked gazes. Adare could remember a time, not so many months earlier, when a tirade like that, delivered with all the woman’s bony conviction, would have shamed and dismayed her. Not anymore. Months spent wrangling with Lehav about the southern force and il Tornja about the northern; months of negotiating with the local merchants’ guilds over grain prices, with aristocrats over taxes, with the endless string of impotent ambassadors from Kaden’s ’Shael-spawned republic, hard-talking idiots who made dozens of promises and twice as many demands without delivering any actual change; months of knowing that a single mistake, a single piece of bad luck, and she would have failed all the people she had sworn to protect; months of listening to her son scream himself to sleep night after night after night-after all those months, she wasn’t as easy to cow as the terrified princess who fled the Dawn Palace a year earlier. And yet, there was nothing to be gained by locking horns with her own Mizran Councillor, especially when the woman was right.
“I did lie,” Adare said. “I want you close to il Tornja, but more than that, I need you here to watch over Sanlitun. To take care of him while I’m gone.”
“Ah,” Nira said, nodding slowly. “So that’s the heart of it. You’ve finally agreed ta part from the child.”
“There’s no other choice,” Adare said, hoping even as she spoke that she might still be wrong. “I have to go to Annur. The legions are undermanned, undersupplied, and exhausted. If I can’t save them, they can’t save Annur, can’t defend the people of Annur, and then what fucking good am I? What’s the point in being Emperor if you let a horde of savages tear apart the people you’re supposed to be protecting?” She shook her head grimly. “That ’Kent-kissing council might just want me there so they have an easier time planting a knife between my ribs, but it’s a risk I have to take. I have to take it. My son does not. It’s safer for him here.”
She shivered as she said that word. Safer. As if any place was really safe with an Urghul army pressing down from the northeast, a false council of incompetent, power-grabbing whores holding Annur, the near-utter collapse of the legions in the south, an utter abdication of all peacekeeping within Annur itself, thieves and bandits prowling the land, and pirates pillaging the seas. There was every possibility that in leaving Sanlitun behind, Adare could be leaving him to die far from her arms.…
She forced the thought from her mind.
Aergad’s walls were battered, but they stood. The Haag flowed deep and fast to the east, a final barrier between the city and the Urghul. Beyond the Haag, il Tornja’s legions still fought their desperate battle. There was danger everywhere, but Aergad was still safer than the dubious welcome that awaited her in Annur.
“Look, Adare,” Nira said. For once, the woman kept her mockery and her anger in check. Her voice, too, seemed to have shifted, leaving behind the gutter slang of which she was so fond for something simpler, older, more sober. “You’re smart to leave your boy-for a dozen reasons-but not with me.”
“Yes, with you. You’re my Mizran Councillor.”
“Your councillor, yes. Not your wet nurse. These tits wore out a thousand years ago.”
“I don’t need you to nurse him,” Adare said. “Or to change him or clean him or swaddle him. I have a dozen women who can do that. I just need you to watch over him. To keep him safe.”
Nira opened her mouth as though to reply, then shut it abruptly. To Adare’s shock, tears stood in the old woman’s eyes, glimmering in the lamplight.
She had a child. The realization hit Adare like a fist to the face. In all the time since she first met Nira on the Annurian Godsway, she’d never thought to ask. For half a heartbeat she checked her memory of the histories of the Atmani, but the histories, for all their macabre detail when it came to the decades of war, were silent on the subject of children. As far as Adare knew, Nira had never married, not that that was any impediment to the bearing of children.
“I’m not the one, girl,” the old woman said, the whole weight of the centuries pressing down on her shoulders, voice rough as unsanded wood. “I’m not the one ta be watchin’ over children.”
Adare stared. She had learned to stand up to the woman’s curses and hectoring, but this sudden, quiet honesty left her dumb. “What happened?” she managed finally.
Nira shook her head. Her gnarled hands clutched each other on the table before her. Adare watched, trying to make sense of that awful, mute grief.
“I can’t do it, girl,” the old woman said finally. “Not again. I won’t.”
In just a few words, Adare heard the full scope of her own midnight horror. Since Sanlitun was born she had tried to tell herself that her nightmares and waking terrors, the endless litany of fears for her child, were nothing but the product of an exhausted, overworked mind. He’s healthy, she would remind herself, studying the child’s plump brown cheeks, his strong fingers wrapped around hers. He’s safe, she would whisper, glancing out her window toward the walls of the city. There’s no reason to be afraid.
Over the months since Sanlitun’s birth, Adare had built these feeble walls between herself and the wilderness of awful possibility that lay beyond. She had half convinced herself that through love, and care, and unending vigilance, she could keep all harm from the fat, fretful child, this tiny, inarticulate being that meant more to her than her own heart. The tears in Nira’s eyes, the twist of her hands, her few quiet words-I can’t do it, girl-tore through those walls like a knife through wet paper. A sudden desperation took Adare by the throat, and for several heartbeats she could barely drag the air into her lungs.
“I don’t…,” she began. Her voice cracked, and she took a deep breath, fixing Nira with her eyes, trying to make the woman see, to understand. “I know it’s not perfect. I know you can’t protect him from everything. But I don’t have anyone else.”
Nira shook her head mutely, and Adare reached across the table, taking the woman’s hands in her own.
“You’re smart,” she said quietly. “You’re strong. And I trust you.”
“They trusted me to rule a whole continent once, girl, and I let it burn. I burned it.”
“We’re not talking about a continent.”
“I know what we’re talking about,” Nira snapped, something like the old querulousness creeping back into her voice. “I had a boy, too. My own boy. I couldn’t save him.”
Adare nodded. She could imagine the horror. She tried not to. “I’m begging you, Nira.”
The woman glared at her through the tears, then pulled her hands away to scrub her eyes. “An emperor doesn’t beg. An emperor commands.”
Adare shook her head. “Not about this.”
Nira turned back to her. “About everything, ya silly slut. That’s what it is to be an emperor.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“Is it an order?”
Adare nodded silently.
“Then I’ll do it,” Nira said. She blew out a long, ragged breath. “I’ll watch over the sobbing little shit while you’re gone.”
Something inside Adare, some awful tension, went suddenly slack. She felt like she, too, might start weeping.
“Thank you, Nira.”
“An emperor doesn’t thank her subject for following her orders.”
“Well, I’m thanking you anyway.”
Nira shook her head grimly. “Thank me when I put the brat back in your arms and he’s still breathing.”
5
With burning lungs and cramping thighs, Kaden forced himself to keep climbing the spiraling wooden stairs. Maut Amut had assured him that the attack on the Spear went no higher than Kaden’s own study, the thirtieth and last of the human floors built into the base of the ancient tower, and yet, after a restless night during which sleep eluded him, he realized he needed to see her, Triste, needed to look at her with his own eyes, to know that she was alive, safe; or safe as he had been able to make her.