Alle Kapitel von THE EMPRESS’S PET: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 6

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

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

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.