Chapter 121: An Honest Likeness

When had she last sat anywhere without a reason?

The chair had been grown, its arms curved up out of the terrace boards and were worn smooth where other guests had rested their wrists. Lilith had one leg crossed over the other and the cup balanced on her knee. The elves had given the drink a name four syllables long. It tasted of blackberry with a green bitterness underneath, and it had cooled enough to take in long swallows.

The breeze came up from the lower branches carrying woodsmoke and the clatter of someone's pots. Overhead the canopy answered it, a hiss that rose, thinned, and rose again.

Far to the east the clone sat at her office in the Spire, working through grain tallies, and every ledger the owl slid across arrived as pressure behind her eyes. Most hours she no longer noticed it. She noticed it now only because nothing else was pulling at her.

The burdens of rule. Rule held, at the moment, by someone who had once planned guild raids around a microwave dinner.

How little any of it troubled her was what she kept circling. She went down the facts the way she would read a character sheet. Male, twenty-five years. Now this: freckled hands around an elven cup, the weight of her chest settling when she breathed, a body every passing ranger looked at twice. Ten months, and not one night spent staring at a ceiling asking who she was. As Jacob, she had lost whole weeks to a single invitation, running it over and over until the days blurred. Now a decision arrived, she made it, and she slept.

Shouldn't a person in her place be coming apart? She turned the cup a quarter on her knee. Perhaps coming apart required free afternoons.

And the business with men. Lately the line annoyed her more than it steadied her. This body answered to a broad shoulder as readily as to a curved hip, and holding the line meant hunger she could have fed in an evening. It held because she had liked women for twenty-five years and had no intention of handing that over along with everything else. That was the whole argument. She drank.

Boots crossed the bridge, light, then uneven, then stopped at the edge of the terrace.

Sylrena stood there with one hand on the strap of the new bow case. Her copper hair was tied back tighter than usual, and she had stopped a full stride short of where a person stops to talk.

"Good morning, Lady Lune."

"Good morning." Lilith set the cup on the chair's arm. Sylrena's thumb kept working along the strap's edge. "Is something wrong?"

She uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. Sylrena's gaze dropped to the boards, came up to the rail behind Lilith's head, and stayed there.

"Well, no. I mean yes. I mean..." Sylrena drew a breath. "I came to ask whether you would mind being painted."

Lilith raised an eyebrow. "You want to paint me?"

"No. No, no." Both hands came up and waved, and the bow case swung against her hip. "It's Seluna. Princess Seluna. She asked if you'd like to be her model."

A few days ago this woman had stood in the market and demanded answers with her chin up. Now she was apologising to the railing.

"And where did that come from?"

"I don't know." Sylrena's hands found the strap again. "She didn't say. She asked me to carry the request, so I'm carrying it."

A princess under confinement until the end of the month, sending a ranger with a commission. Boredom, most likely. Or some cryptic invitation routed through a friend who could walk where the princess could not.

"Interesting." Lilith picked a leaf off her skirt and let the breeze take it. "Tell her I'll come. Provided the Queen and King permit it. I can't wander the palace as I please, guest or not."

"I'll tell her." Sylrena had already turned a shoulder toward the bridge.

"Sylrena."

The ranger stopped with one boot on the first plank.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. Yes." Sylrena's knuckles had gone pale on the strap. "I'm in a hurry. Excuse me, Lady Lune."

She went. The bridge swayed under her, steadied, and swayed again further along, and the copper head dropped out of sight where the walkway bent around the trunk.

Lilith watched the planks settle. Somewhere east, Stolas laid down another ledger, and the clone began on the first column.

She shrugged and picked up the cup. The drink had gone fully cold.

*

Vespera came out of the shade under the eaves, where a moment before there had been only the doorframe and a potted fern. She had put on the grey-haired woman this morning, and she carried a folded sheet of paper.

"Vespera." Lilith tipped the cold dregs over the rail. "Send a note to the Queen. Tell her that her daughter wishes to paint me." The last words came out with a lilt she did not try to flatten.

Vespera stopped beside the chair. "You are not seriously planning to sit for it."

"Why not?" Lilith set the empty cup on the boards. "There are paintings of me already. Half of them were copied from statues, and the rest give me horns the length of my arm. One honest likeness would make a change."

"An honest likeness of Lune."

"Of Lune, then." Her tail would have flicked, if it had been there to flick. "And a princess who likes me is worth more than a council that tolerates me."

Vespera unfolded the paper, glanced at it, and folded it again along the same crease. "The Queen's daughter at our table would be useful. I will word it so the Queen knows the idea was hers."

"Good." Lilith stretched her legs out and crossed them at the ankle. "How's Drakul? Is he still relaxing?"

"He went hunting with the rangers." Vespera tucked the paper into her sleeve. "Again. He left before the second sun cleared the canopy."

"Good. He likes it, then." Lilith looked out past the rail, toward the ridge where the branch traffic thinned into forest. "He's earned it. A thousand years of standing in a courtyard filled with the dead."

Vespera's head tilted. "Is that why you ordered it, rather than suggesting?"

Lilith laughed, low, and picked a second leaf off her skirt. "If I'd suggested it, he'd have thanked me and gone back to standing outside my door." She let the breeze take the leaf. "And if you ask him tonight, he'll tell you the hunt was a training exercise."

*

Helena knocked twice and waited. The breakfast tray from the day before still sat beside the door, its cover in place, the bread under it gone hard. Someone had moved it a hand's width from where the servants usually left it, and nobody had touched the plate since.

Four days ago he had still been taking his meals at the table. Now he ate when the corridor was empty, if he ate at all.

She shifted the portfolio under her arm. The copy of her letter to the capital lay inside it, folded once, with Benedict's signature under her own. He had read it twice at the window, said nothing, and signed with the paladin's mark beside his name. She had written may jeopardise the delegation's purpose and then struck it and written will, and then restored may, because the Chancellery read every word as testimony and she had no incident to point to. The courier had left on the third. Eight days to the capital, if the roads past the fog were dry. Eight back.

"Who is it?"

The voice came from close behind the door. He had been standing there before she knocked.

"Leave it on the step. The food. Leave it and go."

"It's Helena, Ambassador." She kept her voice level. "There's correspondence. It came up on the lift with the morning runner. It's from the Knights of the Sol."

Nothing. A board creaked on the far side.

"The Sol Order?"

"Yes, sir."

"Addressed to whom?"

"To you. By name and rank." She turned the parchment over in her fingers. The wax was unbroken, the seal pressed deep and unfamiliar to her. "The runner said it was handed in at the fog line by a man in a white surcoat who wouldn't give his name."

Steps crossed the room, slow, then quicker. The bolt scraped. The door opened the width of his body and no more.

Cassius had not shaved. The goatee had gone ragged at its edges, and silver stubble ran up into his cheeks. The skin under his eyes hung in grey pouches, and the whites were shot through with red. He wore yesterday's robe. A wine stain had dried brown along the seam.

"Hand it over."

She held it out. He took it by the edge, checked the seal against the light from the corridor window, and broke it with his thumbnail. His lips moved as he read. He reached the bottom, went back to the top, and read it again.

Then he smiled. His mouth stretched without parting, and the corners stayed up.

"Good." He folded the parchment along its creases. "Good. Finally. Finally someone intends to do something."

"Sir, if the Order has made contact with the delegation, the Chancellery will expect a record—"

"It is not for your eyes, Sunwell."

"I'm responsible for the correspondence. All of it. If they're making an offer, or if they're inside imperial borders, the Empress—"

"The Empress," Cassius said, "will be informed of what she needs to know by the man she sent." He tucked the letter inside his robe, against his chest, and his palm stayed flat over it. "You may record that I received it. You may record the date."

The door shut. The bolt went across.

Helena stood in the corridor with her hand still half raised. Below the rail, a bridge swayed as two elves crossed it, talking, a basket of something green between them. The bread on the tray had drawn an ant.

She opened the portfolio, found a blank leaf, and wrote the fifth of Aura and the hour, and received by the Ambassador, contents withheld. Her pen stopped at the end of the line and left a blot.

She closed the portfolio and bowed her head where she stood.

"Solaris," she said under her breath, "let the capital be quick."