The Goblin Emperor (19 page)

Nedaö Vechin was not merely beautiful. Small, slender, with eyes of an extraordinary jade-pale green, she was perfect, her skin like porcelain over the exquisite fineness of her bones. She was dressed with elegant simplicity in a tulip-hemmed dress of a deep rose color with a long, trailing train. Her moonlight hair, piled and braided, was held with tortoiseshell combs and rose-colored ribbons, and her only jewelry was a series of tiny gold-beaded hoops in her ears. She could not have made a more stunning impression if she had been covered in rubies from head to foot.

Maia guessed she was maybe three or four years older than he was, and he marveled at her composure. Effortlessly, she collected the attention of her audience, gave them a brilliant smile, and without any further fanfare began to sing.

Her voice was rich and pure and to Maia astonishingly clean. The best singing he had ever heard before had been one of the Edonomee cook’s daughters, and the power of Min Vechin’s voice was showing him exactly what the difference was between Aäno’s sweet voice singing old ballads and a real singer. Chills were running along his spine, and he was almost afraid to breathe, afraid that somehow he would destroy the beauty she was spinning out of thin air.

He knew none of the songs, knew nothing about the operas they were from. But it did not matter; he listened to Min Vechin and felt almost as if he were flying, carried by her voice. When she stopped, it was a moment before he could collect his wits sufficiently to realize there was something he was supposed to do. The expectant silence said as much, the courtiers’ ears cocking toward him, Min Vechin’s bright, hopeful face and the beginnings of something that might be fear in the back of her eyes.

“Applaud, Serenity,” Telimezh said in an urgent mutter, and in relief and embarrassment, Maia applauded fervently. The courtiers added their applause at once, and Min Vechin curtsied deeply to her emperor before curtsying to the rest of her audience.

He had to rise, to release the courtiers from the bonds of etiquette; but when they began to converse and mingle again, Maia stayed where he was, thinking that now all those stories about emperors who went out among the common people in disguise made a great deal more sense than they ever had in the shabby confines of his bedroom at Edonomee. He looked around at the crowd enthusiastically discussing and dissecting Min Vechin’s performance and wished he could simply have walked over and joined one of those conversations, wished with all his heart that his father had seen fit to have him raised at court—or even in one of the empire’s lesser cities, where at least he could have learned how to conduct himself in society and not been left standing here paralyzed by his knowledge of his own ignorance and ineptitude.

I should leave,
he thought, and was on the verge of turning to indicate as much to his nohecharei when he saw Nurevis plowing determinedly through the crowd toward him, Min Vechin stepping as delicately as a fawn in his wake.

She stopped politely just out of earshot, and Nurevis came up to Maia alone.

“Serenity,” he murmured, “Min Vechin has expressed a great desire to be presented to you. Will you permit us…?”

Maia looked incredulously from Nurevis to Min Vechin and back again. “To … to
us
?”

“You
are
the emperor,” Nurevis pointed out with a smile.

“Yes. Yes, of course … that is, we would be delighted to make the acquaintance of Min Vechin.” It felt as if his face were about to catch on fire.

“Splendid!” Nurevis said, politely ignoring his emperor’s flusterment. He turned and beckoned to Min Vechin, who advanced and made her deepest curtsy yet. “Serenity,” she said, and her voice was as beautiful and clear speaking as it was singing.

Maia felt anything but serene. She was even more dazzling up close, and the scent she wore was delicate and subtly spicy and completely unlike anything Maia had ever encountered before. His heart was hammering.

“We are very pleased to meet you, Min Vechin.” And, scrambling for something to say, he added, “Your voice is very beautiful.”

“Thank you, Serenity,” she said as Maia cursed himself for the moon-witted hobgoblin Setheris had always called him. To his horror, he heard himself continuing, “We know very little about opera, but we enjoyed your singing very much.”

“Your Serenity is most kind,” she said. Her politeness was perfect, but he could feel her retreating behind it, disappointed by the dullness of his response.

“No, I—” He caught himself and said carefully, “We meant that we cannot offer you educated praise, only sincere admiration.”

His slip had at least refocused her attention. Her green eyes, their color made even more dramatic by the kohl darkening her lids, considered him carefully. Some rawly oversensitive part of him noticed that the courtiers were observing the encounter, even while continuing their own conversations.

Then Nedaö Vechin smiled, and the rest of the world dropped away. “We shall treasure Your Serenity’s good opinion all the more, knowing that it is entirely honest.”

She had a slight, unfamiliar accent, the faintest hint of a lisp brushing her sibilants. But the deeper clarity of her voice smoothed her speech into art as radiant as blown glass. Maia realized he had become entranced again and said hastily, “How long have you been with the Zhaö Opera?”

It was a crushingly banal question, but Min Vechin forgave him that, too. “Since we came of age,” she said. “We have wanted to sing since we were very small, but the company will not take underage apprentices. But we sang in their Children’s Choir before that.”

“What does an opera company have to do with a children’s choir?”

She laughed, and he knew he had said something else that betrayed his ignorance. But her smile was still warm. “We see that you have indeed been kept apart from the world of opera, Serenity. Many great operas use a chorus of children. We sang as a tree frog in
The Dream of the Empress Corivero
when we were eleven. And, of course, there are the Michen-operas.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The little operas?” She seemed baffled, but he truly had no idea what she was talking about. “Did Your Serenity never go to a Michen-opera when you were a little boy?”

“No,” he said, and struggled futilely with the idea of explaining how utterly Setheris would have condemned the notion, had it ever arisen. He settled for, “We have always lived far from any but the smallest villages.”

She looked appalled for a flicker of a second, then recovered her manners. “We hope that your first experience will incline you to seek out more opportunities hereafter.”

“Yes,” Maia said, and then Nurevis was at his elbow again, murmuring about someone else who wished to be presented to the emperor.

Min Vechin curtsied deeply, with another brilliant smile, and moved away into the crowd.

Maia, still breathless, watched her go.

It took a considerable, and very deliberate, effort to refocus his attention and be courteous to the person Nurevis was introducing. And the next person. And the next. Everyone wished to be presented to the emperor, and all Maia could do was smile and say neutral, meaningless phrases like, “Thank you,” and “We are very pleased,” and try desperately to remember names and faces. He abandoned as hopeless the deciphering of the intricate connections between House and House until, much later, Nurevis murmured, “And this, Serenity, is Osmin Loran Duchenin.”

Tired and overwhelmed though he was, Maia recognized that name, remembered Csevet saying she was Chavar’s niece: accomplished, ambitious, a rival of Csoru’s. A woman who would want to be empress. He blinked, forcing himself to attend to the woman in green silk who was sweeping a curtsy before him.

As she rose, he saw that she was taller than Csoru, though just as fine-boned. Her eyes were a darker green than Min Vechin’s, and she set them off with peridots. She smiled at him and said, “We hope Your Serenity enjoyed the concert.”

“Very much,” Maia said.

There was a pause in which he knew he should be saying something, but he had no idea what. Osmin Duchenin’s perfect eyebrows drew together in a very slight frown. Then the smile reappeared, and she said, “As a newcomer, Your Serenity must find the Untheileneise Court very confusing.”

“Yes,” Maia said. “It is overwhelming.”

Osmin Duchenin trilled with laughter, as if he had said something witty, and launched into a story about someone she knew (Maia did not catch the exact relationship) who had been three and a half hours late to a dinner engagement because he tried to take a shortcut through an unfamiliar part of the palace and became lost. “In the end, he had to be led out by a
boot boy!
” she finished, trilling with laughter again, and mercifully Nurevis was there before Maia had to find a reply—or even worse, a responding anecdote—this time to suggest that perhaps the emperor would like a glass of metheglin and to meet some of Nurevis’s friends. Maia caught not one of their names, his memory already water-logged and sinking beneath the weight of the evening’s cargo. They were all very much of a type, tall and narrow-faced, eyes pale blue and pale green and pale gray, their features sharp but oddly empty—young men who had never been lonely or afraid or devastated by grief. They ran out the same limp platitudes about Min Vechin’s singing that Maia had been listening to all evening, and he responded as best he could.

There was an awkward pause while everyone sought for something to say. One of the young men stepped bravely into the breach and said, “Does Your Serenity hunt? Your late father the emperor was a notable rider.”

“How could he, cloth-head?” another young man said amiably, saving Maia from having to grapple with any part of the question, either explicit or implied. “Edonomee is in the western marshes. They hunt grouse out there—or is it goose? Birds, anyway.”

“D’you remember,” a third young man broke in, “the time Corvis Pashavar flushed that covey of pheasants?”

“He was riding that dish-faced bay mare, wasn’t he?” said the first young man. “The one that tried to take a piece out of Solichel at the first meet of the Cairen Hunt three years ago?”

“We had forgotten about that,” the third man said, grinning. “Well, Pashavar
warned
him to watch what he was about.”

“Even for a mare, that bay of Pashavar’s has a filthy temper,” said another young man, and within a few minutes, Nurevis’s friends had all but forgotten about the emperor, arguing about Corvis Pashavar’s bay mare and swapping stories about their own horses and their friends’ horses and horses their fathers had told them about. Maia stood and listened, and although he had always disliked metheglin, he drank that entire glass and considered it a very small price to pay.

15

The Problem of Setheris

The morning was bleak; gray clouds heavy with snow loured over the Untheileneise Court. The silence in the emperor’s bedroom was as heavy as the clouds outside. The night before, the emperor had returned to the Alcethmeret very late and more than a little drunk. His edocharei, disapproving, did their work in stern silence. Maia, not hungover but with a mood as cold and dull as the sky, stared out the window and tried not to dwell on the memory of Nedaö Vechin’s voice.

Matters were no better in the dining room, where he burned his tongue with his first sip of tea. Csevet was as brisk and efficient as ever; today it grated on Maia’s nerves, as if there were some veiled reproach or unfavorable judgment behind Csevet’s impassive face.

Once the correspondence had been dealt with—and it was much less now that Maia was granting audiences and attending the convenings of the Corazhas—Csevet said with a shade of reluctance, “Serenity, you have promised to speak to Osmer Nelar this morning.”

The words were like lead weights. It was an effort not to let his shoulders slump or his chin drop. “We did,” he said, and was pleased with how level and uninvolved his voice sounded. “Is that the first item in our docket?”

“Serenity. We thought it best to clear the matter out of the way promptly.”

“Thank you,” Maia said. “Have you found a position we can grant him?”

“We have done our best, Serenity. As it happens, the Lord Chancellor’s office is in rather desperate need of a liaison with the city of Cetho. The previous liaison has just been told he must go south for his health.”

Maia thought of the cold gray clouds over the court and shivered in sympathy. “What does this position entail?”

“Paperwork, mostly,” Csevet said with a momentary expressive grimace that made Maia smile. “The jurisdictions of court and city are, we have been given to understand, tangled at best, particularly in matters of taxation. The Liaison to the City of Cetho, as the post is styled, er, untangles the tangles.”

“We see,” Maia said, reflecting that the position sounded well suited to both Setheris’s talents and his self-importance. “And you said the position belongs to the Lord Chancellor’s office?”

“Serenity. The civil liaison is a position expressly intended to
prevent
these matters taking up the emperor’s time. Osmer Nelar would report to the Lord Chancellor.” Csevet hesitated, then said, “He would have neither reason nor justification to seek an audience with Your Serenity, and we venture to predict that the Lord Chancellor would be grossly offended were he to try.”

And Uleris Chavar, Setheris’s old enemy, was just the man to sit on him if necessary. “Thank you, Csevet. It sounds perfect.”

“Serenity,” Csevet said, bowing.

“When does our cousin await us?”

“Half past nine, Serenity. In the Michen’theileian.”

Maia glanced at the clock and was dismayed to discover it was already nearly nine.
Self-indulgent sluggard,
he said bitterly to himself. He looked without pleasure at the array of beautiful dishes Dachensol Ebremis had sent up from the kitchen and poured himself more tea. With Setheris waiting for him, he knew he would taste nothing but ashes, and his stomach was already heavy and cramping without the added insult of food. Even the tea did not offer real solace, but a memory of Setheris sneering at chamomile as fit only for peasants and barbarians.