Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(26)

“The world” seemed an apposite term for those who observed her now—tens of thousands of Annur’s citizens gathered in the Valley of Eternal Repose to see a great man laid to his rest in this narrow, treeless vale lined with the tombs of her ancestors. It would not do to weep before them, regardless of her grief. She already looked out of place, a young woman seated amidst the clutch of aging High Ministers, all of them men.

The position on the raised podium was rightfully hers twice over—once by dint of her royal birth and, most recently, as a result of her elevation to Minister of Finance, an elevation spelled out in her father’s testament. It was an important post, nearly as important as the kenarang or Mizran Councillor, and one for which she had been preparing for the better part of her life. I’m ready for this, she told herself, thinking back over the thousands of pages she had read, the countless delegations she had welcomed for her father, the ledgers she had studied late into the night. She understood Annur’s finances better than the outgoing minister, and yet she was certain that, to those assembled in the valley, she did not look ready.

She would look, to many of the thousands of eyes that rested upon her, like a woman too long without a husband and children, attractive enough to invite marriage (even without her imperial titles), if perhaps too thin, tall, and honey-skinned in a city where the fashion ran to voluptuous, small women with darker complexions. Adare knew well enough that her straight hair emphasized the angularity of her face, making her look slightly severe. As a child, she had experimented with other styles. Now the severity suited her purposes; when the assembled throng looked up at her podium, she wanted people to see a minister, not a simpering girl.

Of course, those who stood close enough were unlikely to remember anything but her eyes, irises that burned like coals. Everyone used to say that Adare’s eyes blazed even more brightly than Kaden’s, not that it mattered. Despite the fact that she was two years older, despite her father’s careful tutelage, despite her familiarity with the policies and politics of the Annurian Empire, Adare would never sit the Unhewn Throne. As a child, she had once been innocent enough to ask her mother why. It is a man’s seat, the woman replied, ending the conversation before it began.

Adare had not felt the full heft of that statement until now, seated among these men, waiting for the bier carrying her father to make its progress up the long valley. Though she, like they, wore dark ministerial robes cinched around the waist with a black sash, though the golden chain of office hung around her neck as it did around theirs, though she sat shoulder to shoulder with these few who, beneath the Emperor himself, ruled the civilized world, she was not one of them, and she could feel their invisible doubts, their decorous resentment cold and silent as snow.

“This is a place heavy with history,” Baxter Pane observed. Pane served as Chief Censor and Minister of Custom. Though, or perhaps because, his post was less significant than Adare’s, he was among those who had questioned her ascension most openly. “History and tradition.” That last word sounded like an accusation in his mouth, but gazing out over the Valley of Eternal Repose, Adare could not disagree. From Alial the Great’s stone lions to her own father’s fa?ade, a rising sun in bas-relief above the doorway into darkness, she could trace the sure hand of the Malkeenian line.

“The problem with tradition,” observed Ran il Tornja, “is that it takes so much ’Kent-kissing time.” Il Tornja was the kenarang, the empire’s commanding general, and evidently some sort of military genius. The Ministerial Council, at any rate, had respected him enough to raise him to regent while Annur waited for Kaden’s return.

“Surely you bury your soldiers when they are killed in battle?” she responded pointedly. Il Tornja was, after Adare, the youngest person on the podium, perhaps somewhere in his mid-thirties. More important, he had been the only one who seemed to accept her appointment to Finance. He might make a natural ally, but she couldn’t help bristling at his tone. “Surely a general looks after his fallen men.”

He shrugged off the note of challenge in her voice. “If there’s opportunity. I’d rather be running down the ones who killed them.”

Adare took a deep breath. “There will be time enough for that, and soon. Uinian should be dead within the month—within the week, if I have my way.”

“I’m all for summary execution, but don’t you need some sort of trial? The man is the Chief Priest of Intarra. I imagine his congregation might take it amiss if you just hanged him from the highest tree.”