CHAPTER THREE : LESSONS

Cassia’s POV

A 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 different people who pretend they aren’t.”

“Furniture appreciates the briefing.”

“Then study, because here comes the examiner. Officer Brann inspects at the third bell. When she asks if you’re content, you say yes. When she asks if you eat well, you say yes. When she asks if the Empress speaks to you kindly — you hesitate, just so, and say it isn’t your place to say.”

“Why hesitate?”

“Because happy pets are suspected of scheming, and miserable ones of escaping. Hesitation says: loved, and not sure of it. It’s the safest thing a new pet can be.”

“Gods. Is the whole palace theater?”

“The whole world. The palace just gets an audience.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper that would not have carried past a hawk. “The whole court’s been summoned tomorrow. Audience Chamber, all houses. And — this is the part — they say the Dowager herself is coming out of retirement for it. First time in years.” She straightened the leather band at my throat with two competent tugs. “Somebody’s head is going to roll. Wear your good face.”

The Dowager, I thought, filing it where I filed everything the Empress’s aunt did — under knives.

“How long have you been here, Maira?”

“Born in the west stable loft, why?”

“And you’re still alive, and still chatty. That means you’re either very stupid or very smart.”

“Smart enough never to answer that question.” She stole a sugar lump and grinned, and I did the arithmetic I always did with her: when they realize what I am, they will hang Maira for failing to spot me, and I will have to be the one to stop it.

What I cannot survive is being seen pouring wine by Iseult, the shield-captain, who has the eyes of a customs officer and the sense of humor of one. My father’s staff trained me on state banquet service when I was eleven, between knife drills, because General Mercour believed his daughter should be able to sabotage a dinner party from the claret. Maira knows none of this. Maira knows only that the new pet might pour too well.

The palace bells had just rung mid-morning when the doors opened, and I did the un-furniture thing, which is stop breathing.

The Empress does not knock. The Empress arrives, and the room reorganizes itself around her like iron filings — Iseult to the door, Maira to the wall, me into a curve so practiced it hurts. But today she came in already watching me, and today, instead of sweeping past to her desk, she stopped, three steps in, and said to the room at large:

“Out.”

Maira vanished like a conjuror’s dove. Iseult hesitated — one full second of Majesty, she’s not vetted, as loud to a trained read as a shout — and then went, and the door clicked, and I was alone with the most dangerous woman alive for the second time in my life.

“Walk to the table,” said the Empress. “Pour.”

I did. Two steps behind on the left, though she wasn’t walking — force of habit. The decanter. The cloth over the arm. The pour, clean and high and silent, not one drop, my father’s exacting ghost standing at my shoulder to inspect the lip of the pour like he used to—

“Stop.”

I stopped.

“Again. From the beginning. Walk to the table, and this time walk like the floor is worth walking on. You have knuckles. Use them. You have a spine — I have seen it. Deploy it.”

I turned, carefully keeping my face mild and stupid and safe. “Majesty?”

“Again,” said the Empress of Vharen, and came and stood beside me, close enough that the winter of her reached my skin — and then she adjusted me. One gloved hand at my elbow, lifting it a degree. Two fingers at my wrist, correcting the tilt. A palm flat and brief between my shoulder blades — up — and every one of those touches landed like a struck bell. I am trained to read a body at contact. Hers said: athlete. Killer. Barely leashed. And her voice, above my ear, said none of those things. It said, patiently, like a tutor’s:

“Again.”

I poured. It was, I note with professional outrage, perfect — the best pour of my life, because my body was attending to her hand at my wrist the way compasses attend north, and my hands were steady as bedrock, and the wine sang into the glass without a sound.

“Better.” She did not move away. “Who taught you to pour like that?”

“My — my father’s household, Majesty. He liked things done properly.”

“Did he.”

“He was particular, Majesty. About wine. About… everything.”

“Particular,” the Empress repeated, tasting the word like the wine she couldn’t taste. “And where is this particular father now?”

“Dead, Majesty.” The wet eyes, wet on schedule. “Before I could know him.”

“Mm.” In the window glass I watched myself watch her: pet and empress, mystery and weapon, and in the reflection her eyes were on my reflection’s mouth. “Dead fathers ask the best questions, my household says. Their daughters always answer for them.”

“Lesson Two,” she said abruptly. “Doors. Recite it.”

“I may touch a door only to hold it open for Majesty. I may not close one in the face of a superior. I enter last and leave—”

“Last. Say the exception.”

“Pets enter last and leave last, Majesty. There is no exception.”

“There is one. When the room is on fire, you leave first — and you leave carrying something I will not name until you’ve earned the naming of it.”

“I don’t understand, Majesty.”

“No.” Something almost like satisfaction moved through her voice. “But you looked at the windows while you said it. Count the exits, do you?”

Silence. The wrong kind to confess in and the wrong kind to lie in.

“Good,” she said. “You’re not pretending to be furniture at all. Furniture never counts.”

Her thumb moved once, deliberately, across my captured wrist — over the exact spot where the pulse lives — the pin sleeps coiled in my hair, and everything else I am is hidden two inches beneath her glove. My pulse knocked. Once. Loud.

“The collar sits better today,” she said. A statement, mild as milk, about the leather band.

“Th-thank you, Majesty.”

“Don’t thank me. I haven’t decided what you are.” She released my wrist and stepped back, Empress again from boots to crown. “In this palace, the sweetest faces lie best. It is practically a coat of arms. So I will ask you once, and you will consider that I have heard four hundred lying faces from people who loved me, and none of them got to keep their positions.” She tilted her head. “Which are you, pet? Sweetest face in Vharen?”

And here is what I should have said. The doctrine had an answer drafted for this, a good one, humble and wounded and dull — I’m nobody, Majesty; my whole talent was being born pretty — the kind of nothing that closes a door and files a subject.

I looked at the wine, poured perfect, and at her glove, and at my own wrist, and my mouth — traitor in its own right, apparently — said:

“I’m the best pour in the palace, Majesty.”

A silence. The long kind, with weight at the bottom of it.

And then the Empress of Vharen laughed — laughed, one short breath of it, gone as soon as it came, but a real laugh, six years deep, like something unearthing itself — and turned for the door.

“Tomorrow,” she said, without stopping, “we work on your lying face. I want to see it improved.”