Romane von Raven

Sera’s POVI was seven years old the first time I saw a widow’s-veil orchid. It grew in my aunt’s winter garden, pale as a drowned girl, and she told me it was named for queens who outlived their husbands, and she let me smell it, and I remember the smell even now — a smell like the inside of a bell.At my coronation, the wine was vintage Vharen red, poured by my aunt’s own steward from my aunt’s own cellar, toasted by my aunt with my aunt’s own recipe of love. Love is the door through which the knife enters. I was twenty-three. I woke nine days later in a dark room with my taste gone and my body turned traitor — cycles now, fever and ice on a schedule, managed, hidden, never seen — and with one inheritance I did not ask for: the oil of the pressed widow’s-veil bloom will kill me faster than it kills anyone alive. My body learned the poison the hard way. It never forgot.The Circle thinks I do not know its flower. The Circle believes an Empress who cannot taste cannot fear the table.

Cassia’s POVHere is what nobody tells you about almost dying by dog: afterward, your body wants to be held, and it does not care whose arms.The Empress walked me back to my apartments through the private corridors, and she did not hold my arm, and her hand did not touch me once, and I have never in my life been so aware of someone’s hands. She dismissed Iseult at the door. She dismissed the corridor. Then she dismissed my entire staff, which for an Empress is a sentence: “Out. All of you. The Empress does not trust servants with what is hers.”Hers. The word went through me like the sugar went through the dog.“You’re shaking,” she said, when the doors had closed.“I’m cold, Majesty.”“You’re not cold.” She crossed the room unhurried, the way she does everything that frightens her. “You nearly died today, and the palace watched you do it on your knees. That has a taste. I know the taste.”“It’s a fine taste for a pet, Majesty.”“Stop that.”“Majesty?”“Stop performing for me.” Quiet

Sera’s POVMy pet lies better today. I had promised to improve her lying face, and she had presented me, at the morning lesson, with a masterpiece of it — humble, wounded, guileless, and so much worse than yesterday’s that I nearly applauded. Yesterday she lied like a girl. Today she lied like a treasury. Four days since the auction, four mornings of lessons — and I was still deciding what to do about that when the Senate did it for me.“The petition, Majesty.” Iseult at the Audience Chamber doors, face arranged into her customs-officer blank, which she believes I cannot read. “All houses attending. The Dowager has come out of retirement for the occasion.”Of course she has. My aunt leaves her salon for two things a year, and both of them are me.The Audience Chamber of Vharen is built to make a person feel the way an insect feels under glass — I designed the renovation myself, at nineteen, out of spite. This morning it was full: the faction of the rose, the faction of the coin, the f

Cassia’s POVA palace pet, it turns out, has a curriculum.Nobody tells you this. You imagine the gilded cage is idle — baths, gowns, being decorative at things. In reality, I have a schedule. Sunrise: dress — gown, hair, and the plain leather band the household’s ledger calls a “training collar,” plain as a working dog’s, which Maira swears is temporary and I have privately named the leash. Then Maira talks at me for two hours while taking inventory of my hair for structural weaknesses. Then the household officer inspects my conduct like a horse’s hooves. Then there are the Lessons.Lesson One was walking. Lesson Two: doors. Lesson Three was today: the pouring of wine.“She’s watching you again,” Maira murmured, wrestling my sleeve flat. “The tall one. She’s been watching you since you arrived. Don’t look! Don’t look. Good, yes, be furniture.”“I am furniture,” I agreed meekly.“You’re new furniture. New furniture gets watched until it’s old furniture. Then it gets watched by differe

Sera’s POVThere are three kinds of silence in my palace, and I have learned them the way other people learn languages.The silence of the afraid, which rustles. The silence of the scheming, which listens. And the silence of my own apartments at night, which is not silence at all but the sound of six years of nights refusing to be filled.My aunt calls it madness, my isolation. She says it with jam on her voice: Niece, an Empress who trusts no one can be ruled by anyone. She believes she is being subtle.For six years, every pet, companion, and lady-in-waiting offered to me arrived pre-gifted from her salon, sweetened and vetted and murmuring, and I kept them the way one keeps bouquets — because refusing them publicly would confess I knew whose greenhouses they came from. They reported on my moods to a woman who crafted my moods at a coronation with a wine cup and a family recipe.The poison did not kill me. It did something she finds more useful. It took my sense of taste — I have ea

Cassia’s POVThe man selling me looked at my teeth before he named my price.I opened my mouth like a good little lot forty-one and let him, because the first rule of being sold is to seem worth buying.The second rule — the one my father’s men drilled into me between knife lessons and grief — is that the girl worth buying is never the girl they think they bought.“Healthy stock!” the auctioneer crowed. He had the voice of a man who had sold everything once: sisters, widows, a duchess. “Noble blood, trained manners, and look at that face, my lords — that is a face built for palaces. The Empire’s finest houses are bidding for her tonight.”Not a name you can sell, I thought, staring at a crack in the stage boards. The rolls struck mine the day the headsman took my father’s. You are selling a no-one called Cassia, with no house, no father, and no future, and if the gods are kind, in three months no one will remember her at all.“Name?” the auctioneer demanded, rapping the boards under m