Another time, Adare might have studied her further, or the lean figure seated beside her who could only be Kiel. Now, however, her gaze slid past them to the third member of the Annurian delegation, Kaden, her brother. The one she hadn’t killed.
“Your Radiance,” he said quietly, rising as she met his eyes, then bowing low.
There was no meekness in the movement, no submission.
“I understand,” she replied grimly, “that you’ve acquired a title of your own. First Speaker.” She inclined her head a fraction of an inch.
He didn’t look like a holder of titles. His robe was simpler in both cut and cloth than those of the other council members. In a room full of flashing gems, he had scorned all ornament. He was taller than she had expected, taller than Valyn, and leaner. His shaved scalp reminded her of the legions she commanded, and there was something, too, of a soldier’s discipline in the way he held himself. Unlike those men she had seen at the front, however, there was no bluster to Kaden, no swagger. His strength was in his stillness, his silence. And in those burning eyes.
My brother, she thought, staring at those fires with unexpected wonder. Then, remembering their surroundings, she erased all expression from her face.
After the confusion and consternation caused by her entrance, the assembly had fallen abruptly quiet. It was a quiet that Adare remembered well, a quiet she had first heard when she stood in the palace infirmary with her dying mother. A team of useless surgeons and physicians had attended the Emperor’s wife through the final days of her illness, bickering in scholarly whispers as she coughed blood into meticulously boiled cloths. When Adare stepped into that bright, white room, however, the greatest medical minds of the empire had fallen suddenly silent, as though she might forget they were there, might believe she had been given a moment of privacy with her mother.
It hadn’t worked then, and it didn’t work now. Whatever exchange she was about to have with Kaden, it would be public, political. The angles of this particular silence afforded no space for intimacy. Not that she had any intimacy to offer.
“So this is the heart of your republic,” she said, not bothering to keep the scorn from her voice, letting her anger boil through the words. It wouldn’t hurt for him to see her anger, for them all to see it.
He shook his head. “Not mine. Ours.”
Adare could hear her father in that response, in the cool deliberation of it. There was no shock in his eyes, no dismay, only the steady burning of those twin fires, cold, and bright, and distant. In this, too, he was like her father. Adare couldn’t remember ever seeing Sanlitun surprised.
“How inclusive,” she replied grimly.
Kaden spread his hands. “If you had warned us of your approach, we could have given you safe passage through the city. I will call a surgeon to see to your wounds.”
She shook her head curtly. The motion sent pain up her neck. She ignored it.
“There’s no need for a surgeon, and no time for one either. What were you thinking ordering armed men into the streets, ordering them to raise weapons against your own people?”
Kaden blinked. That, at least, was something new. Sanlitun would not have blinked.
“We heard that a mob was forming. An angry mob.”
“And so you sent out a few hundred brick-brained fools to murder them?”
“Murder?” Gabril demanded sharply.
“Yes,” Adare said, rounding on the man. “Murder. People trampled by horses, their skulls shattered by the flats of swords, their bodies scattered across the Godsway like offal. I think I’d call that murder.”
“The guards were ordered to protect you,” Kaden said. “At all costs.”
“At the cost of dead Annurians?”
This time he did not flinch. “If necessary, yes. Without you, we would have nothing. No alliance. No peace. None of the unity necessary to hold Annur together.”
“And how much unity do you think you’re going to have with a few dozen bodies sprawled out on the stones of the Godsway? How much ’Kent-kissing peace?”
Her anger, so useful just moments before, was getting the better of her now. She could hear it; she was too loud. Nira had counseled her again and again on the importance of holding her tongue and her peace. Ironic, given the source, but good advice all the same. Adare could hardly rule an empire if she let herself be goaded into fury by one insane decision by the council. An emperor listened, waited, judged men and women in the silent chambers of her mind, and only spoke when it was necessary, when she was ready to wed the words to action. Adare knew it all well enough, but there was no holding her rage in check. In fact, the more rein she gave it, the greater it grew.
“I understood the risks,” she said, turning to confront the other members of the council, “when I rode my horse into the city alone.”
“Evidently not,” Ziav Moss cut in. The Kreshkan touched his cheek with a fingertip as though to remind her of her wounds. The gesture was gentle, understated. From another man it might even have been deferential, but Moss was not built for deference. The man came from one of the oldest families in the empire; he was all dark, oiled hair and urbanity. His words were soft, but pillows were soft, too, and Adare had read of rulers being suffocated in their sleep with them.
“I accepted the risk,” she said. “After all your slander, it was necessary for the people to see me alone and unarmed, coming back to this city not as a conqueror with a hundred guardsmen at my back, but as an emperor walking among her people.”
“Looks like they didn’t like what they saw.”
Adare rounded on the newest speaker, a salt-haired, sun-browned woman well into her sixth decade.
Randi Helti. Of course. The boat lady. Aside from Kegellen, Helti had the only self-made fortune in the room, and no reverence for royalty.
“The crucial thing, Captain Helti, is not the liking, but the fucking seeing.” Adare gestured to the ceiling high above their heads, huge windows set into it like gems, glass gold with the afternoon light. She swept a hand over the catwalks, the chairs, the grand, ridiculous map, all the way to the huge bloodwood doors through which she had entered. Those had swung shut again as silently as they had opened. “You think you can do all your work from this room?” She turned to confront the others. “You think you can sit in your impeccably crafted chairs and rule an empire?”
“You dare…,” Bouree sputtered, leaning forward in his seat until Moss waved him down.
“We have ruled this republic,” the Kreshkan said mildly, “for nearly a year now. And we will continue to do so. The only question is whether or not your … theatrics will prove useful to the task.” He frowned, as though genuinely disappointed. “I suspect not. You’ve been out there, scuttling all over the north, rubbing elbows with your precious people, and what has it gained you? Hmm?”
Adare stared. “What has it gained me?” Her pulse pounded in her temple. Blood was running down her face again. “What has it fucking gained me?”
“Do you intend to answer the question,” Moss asked, brows raised, “or would you prefer to simply repeat it with foul language added for flavor?”
“What it has gained,” Adare snarled, “is our survival. Mine. Yours. All Annur’s.”
“While we all appreciate your enthusiasm, surely that is overstating the case. While the common soldier may respond to this type of hyperbole, it is not necessary here. The men and women of this council are learned and worldly. You need not rant, nor throw your hands about in this ludicrous manner, nor overstate the situation to the north.”
Adare clenched her hands into fists at her sides. “I am not overstating it,” she hissed. “The situation to the north is nothing short of desperate. Long Fist is killing people. He is cooking them. He is taking them apart piece by piece and making sculptures from those pieces. And then there’s Balendin, a Kettral-trained leach. He grows more powerful every day, and he’s every bit as vicious as the man he obeys.”