CHAPTER FIVE : THE COLLAR

Cassia’s POV

Here 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. Flat. The voice she uses on the empire, inverted. “You’ve been performing since the auction block. Tonight the audience is gone. Sit down, and for one hour, be something unsold.”

I want to describe the bath honestly, because I have been trained to report, and this is the report: the Empress of Vharen knelt at the bath edge and washed my hair herself, sleeves pinned, rings removed and set in a line on the marble where I counted them — four — and if the report ends there, it is because the rest of what happened was not information.

It was her hands.

They moved like something that had been a weapon so long it had forgotten other uses and was remembering now, slowly, badly, gorgeously. At the scars. I have twelve years of them — the riding crop across my shoulders at nine because I flinched from the blade; the fine white line under my ribs from a tutor’s demonstration; the burn on my left forearm shaped like a lesson. She found each one in turn. Her hands stopped on each. She asked nothing.

Do you understand what that is worth? Everyone who ever found a scar asked. My father’s men asked does it slow you. My handlers asked can you still be hurt there, can we use it. The auction house asked with their fingers and priced accordingly.

She asked nothing. She washed the sugar and the auction out of my hair and her thumbs made slow circles at my temples like she was erasing a week, and my heartbeat had stopped performing entirely — the bird was loose, battering, honest — and she could hear it, she could hear everything, and I should have clamped it down and I could not, I sat in the steam and let her hear it, which in the language of my life is the most dangerous thing I have ever done with my clothes off.

“Your heart is loud,” she said at last. Not a command. An observation, quiet, almost gentle.

“It’s a traitor, Majesty. It was born in the wrong army.”

“Then it belongs here. The palace is full of them.” A pause. Steam moving. And then, so quietly it almost stayed under the water: “Mine too.”

“The crop, the ribs, the arm,” she said, a moment later. “May I ask, or will you perform your way out of it?”

“You just asked, Majesty.”

“Cassia.”

“It was training,” I said. The truth, unarmored, and how strange it sounded, like a coin from a dead country. “Where I’m from, we — it was training.”

“Where you’re from,” she said, “a house trained you. Kneel-drills. Fear with craftsmanship in it. I told you — I will collect. Not tonight.” Her breath moved at my nape. “Tonight I have one question, and you will find it is not about your father, or your house, or your war.”

“Majesty—”

“Do you want to be here?”

The steam held its breath with me.

“That is not a pet’s answer, Majesty.”

“I didn’t ask the pet. I asked you.”

And because it was the one question with no repertoire for it, I looked down, into the water, at her four rings on the marble, and gave her the only honest thing I own: silence.

She saw me look down. She let me. That was its own mercy, and its own promise.

The palace bells rang the hour while the water cooled. Then she took the collar from the table — my collar, white gold and Vharen blue, heavier than shame — and she stood me at the mirror with my hair down, wet, and she fastened it at my throat with her breath at my nape, and the rules came in her real voice, the quiet one, the one the empire never hears:

“You will survive because I say so. Kneel when I look. Speak when I nod. Want me as quietly as I want you.”

“Not Majesty,” she said.

The water ticked in the pipes.

“Not— Majesty?”

“Tonight, not Majesty,” she said, patient as winter. “Sera. Say it.”

“Sera,” I said, and it fit my mouth like a key I hadn’t known I was carrying.

In the mirror her eyes found mine and held them, pale as the first snow, and her mouth was one breath from the place where my neck meets my shoulder, and the whole world narrowed to the space where a kiss would be if either of us were brave — and I was, I found, for the first time in twelve years, the less brave of the two of us.

“Sleep, pet,” she said, and took her rings from the marble one by one and left me the steam and the mirror and the shape of her voice to fall apart in alone.

I did not cry. I am reporting, and the report says I did not cry, and the report is filed where all my best fictions live.

The laundry came at dawn. Maira brought it chattering. “— and the Lord Treasurer’s engagement is off, all the contracts returned, and the west terrace dogs are being replaced with hounds from the north, proper ones, and did you hear about the dead dog? Gods. The poor Empress. I nearly fainted in the linen room.”

“You’re not listening. Cassia? Cass. Did you hear about the dog?”

“I heard about the dog, Maira.”

“Good.” She sniffed. “You’ve gone quiet as a lord. Don’t go quiet as a lord.”

She never saw my hands stop on the third shirt, because the knot was wrong. A laundry knot. Tied left-over-right in a pattern only two people in the world ever used: me, and a boy called Wren, who learned it beside me on a river dock when we were ten — and who was now, apparently, carrying laundry inside the palace of the Empress of Vharen.

I waited until her footsteps faded. Then I picked the knot apart with a hairpin that is not a hairpin, and found the paper, and read it by the gray light, and it said:

The Orchid Circle moves at the Equinox Ball. You know what the flower means. Do not disappoint your father.

Do not disappoint your father.

I sat on the floor in my borrowed nightgown with a collar of white gold at my throat and did the arithmetic I have been refusing to do since the auction block. The Equinox Ball. The Empress’s own ball, the whole court under one roof, the delivery my handlers had told me would be “simply a gift, carried like a gift” — and I had known what the flower meant since I was nine years old and found the pressed specimen in my father’s papers: widow’s-veil orchid, oil of the pressed bloom, the recipe of the woman who poisoned her niece at a coronation. The Circle does not send the flower to decorate.

It sends the flower to finish.

And the woman whose pulse I now know by feel — four rings, slow circles, mine too — would be standing under the Equinox chandeliers with my hands having carried it to her. Because that was the other arithmetic, the one I could not solve: somewhere between the auction block and the bath, I had started forgetting to hate her.

My father was executed by the last Empress. His daughter was forged for this. Every scar on my body is a lesson toward it, and the man who paid for those scars is ash, and ash does not knock on doors, and ash cannot say Cassia, look at me in a voice like the first snow.

“Do not disappoint your father,” the paper said.

And for the first time in twelve years, I did not care what my father would have wanted.