The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(35)

She paused at the top of the stair, amazed that she recognized so little of the place. But then Imhailas had taken her here at night and in a panic, and she had not stepped foot outside Naree’s apartment until the Shrial Knights had dragged her out screaming and weeping weeks later. She looked about, realizing that she had never been on this stair, or in this hall, not really. The camp lanterns made a grotesquerie of the uneven plastering. The emerald paint had begun peeling back in a singular direction, so that it resembled something reptilian.

She saw her daughter waiting by the apartment door, her face pale even for this gloom. Theliopa’s gown (yet another one of her own manufacture) consisted of black and white lace pleats, packed so dense as to resemble closed codices in places, and everywhere strung with tiny black pearls. Her flaxen hair had been pinned high into a matching headdress. Esmenet smiled for the simple relief of seeing someone she truly trusted. This was the way it was with tyrants, she knew, how their trust was whittled down until only blood remained.

“You’ve done very well, Thelli. Thank you.”

The girl blinked in her odd way.

“Mother. I can see what you-you are about to do.”

Esmenet swallowed. She hadn’t expected honesty. Not here.

“And what of it?”

She wasn’t sure she could stomach it.

“I would beg you to reconsider,” Theliopa said. “Don’t do it, Mother.” Esmenet approached her daughter.

“What do you think your father would say?”

The shadow of a scowl marred the blank fixity of Theliopa’s gaze.

“I hesitate to say, Mother.”

“Why?”

“Because I know it will harden you-you against what must-must be done.”

Esmenet laughed in mock wonder.

“Such is the grudge I hold against my husband?”

Theliopa blinked, paused in calculation.

“Yes, Mother. Such is the grudge.”

It suddenly seemed that she dangled from a hook.

“Y-you have no inkling of what I suffered here, Thelli.”

“I see a great deal in your face, Mother.”

“Then what would you have me do? What your father would do?”

“Yes!” the girl cried with surprising vehemence. “You must kill her, Mother.”

Esmenet gazed at her beloved daughter in reproach, if not disbelief. She was past being surprised by her extraordinary children.

“Kill her? And for what? For doing the very thing I would have done? You see only the consequence of the life I have lived, daughter. You know nothing of the blood and bitumen that fills a bowl so cracked as your mother! You know nothing of the terror! Grasping and grasping for life, for bread, for medicine, for the gold needed to secure these things with dignity. Killing her would be killing myself!”

“But why would you-you confuse yourself with this woman? Sharing the same-same weal does nothing to change the fact that you are the Empress, and she-she is the whore who betrayed you, that had-had Imhailas murd—”

“Shut up!”

“No, Mother. Momemn is besieged. You are Father’s vessel, the one anointed to rule-rule in his absence. All eyes are upon-upon you, Mother. You must-must gratify them, show them the strength they need to see. You must-must be ferocious.”

Esmenet gazed at her daughter, stupefied by that word, “ferocious.”

“Think of Kelmomas, Mother. Imagine if he had died because of that woman.”

The fury had always been there, of course, the will to make suffer, to gloat and glory in vengeance. Her soul’s eye had witnessed Naree die countless ways for what she had done—enough to make a habit of bloody imagery. The girl had betrayed her, had sold her life and the lives of all those she loved for silver. It all came rushing back, a cringing, noxious tide, the girl’s petty cruelties, her peevish need to humiliate a deposed queen, a mourning mother …

Esmenet looked to her beloved and inhuman daughter, watched the girl read and approve the savage turn in her thought, saw the clenched jaw where slack eyes had been.

“If you wish, I will do it for you, Mother.”

Esmenet shook her head, caught each hand in the other to prevent either from floating away. She could taste the words she had spoken months ago, the oath they had contained.

“It means that your life—your life, Naree—belongs to me …”

“She’s my burden. You said so yourself.”

Theliopa raised the pommel of a knife she produced as if by magic from the intricacies of her gown.

Esmenet could taste the thing when she inhaled, or at least so it seemed. She clutched the handle, felt a cloud of gas for the heft of it, the lethal solidity. Her husband’s eyes watched her from her daughter’s angular face. She flinched from them, looked down out of some unnameable instinct. She turned to the door, numb, barged through on a deep breath.

The chipped, yellow-painted walls. The tawdry simulation of opulence. The tincture of too many bodies and too little bedding.

The Inchausti had been no more gentle this visit than the Shrial Knights had been the previous. The girl’s shelves had been ransacked, her furnishing smashed and thrown as wrack in the corners.

Esmenet had returned, this time steeped in the very power she had fled from before. It seemed mad that the floorboards did not creak, the walls did not groan, for the presence of one who could burn everything down.