The Goblin Emperor (53 page)

“Then thou dost not … I wondered if it was my fault, that she hated me so much.”

“No,” Idra said at once and with some vehemence. “She would have hated anyone who came between her and what she saw as her right.”

“To be empress?”

“No. That’s why Csoru hates thee.” Idra grimaced. “I’m sorry. That was an awful thing to say.”

“But it’s true,” Maia said. “I knew that the first time I met her.”

“Mother didn’t care about that—although I don’t say she wouldn’t have
liked
being the Empress Sheveän. But no. She believed her right was to be the
mother
of the emperor.”

“Then she was championing thee after all. I had thought—”

“No,” Idra said again. “Or, well, in a way. But it wasn’t about
me.
” He hesitated. “I have never said this to anyone, not even my father, although it was he who helped me to understand that Mother’s ferocity—like a beast, yes? not a choice, but something she cannot take off, as a beast cannot take off its fur—that that was not something I had done, or that Mireän and Ino had done, and that it was not something we could undo. But he loved her, and I did not want to upset him.”

“Of course not,” Maia said.

Idra gave him a grateful smile. “But maybe thou canst tell me if I am wrong—it seems to me that Mother does not care very much about people as people. She never saw you as a
person,
just as something wrong. And when I say she wanted to be the mother of the emperor, I don’t mean that she wanted
me
to be emperor. She wanted
her son
to be emperor. And she has always gotten very angry at people who won’t play the roles she puts them in. I think that’s why she always wants people like Osmin Bazhevin around her.”

“And it was not my place to be emperor.”

“Yes. And thou didst not abdicate. I remembered, later, that’s what she’d said when she realized thou wert the only one left. That thou shouldst abdicate. And I think that’s really what she thought.”

“And so she was angry at me because I didn’t.” It made sense, and in a peculiar way, it made him feel better. It meant there really was nothing he could have done.

“Yes. And because thou didst things that Varenechibel would not have done.” Idra added hastily, “I do not mean it as a criticism!” and Maia realized that he had winced, remembering Shulivar.

“No, I know. I’m sorry.” He hesitated, then offered a partial truth: “I find being compared to him … oppressive.”

Shyly, Idra offered a truth in return, “I hope thou wilt have a son quickly. For I do not want to be emperor.”

“I understand,” Maia said. They smiled at each other, bound together in that moment by the responsibility that neither of them wanted and that one of them still might escape.

Maia thought about that, and he thought about Vedero, who had kept her promise to let him watch the eclipse with her. She kept her telescope on the roof of her apartments, reached through a trap and by means of a ladder that was nothing more than iron rungs bolted to the wall. He was glad she was wearing trousers, although she had apologized for them, glad also that she had warned him, through his edocharei, not only to dress warmly, but to bring two pairs of gloves. The thick fur-lined mittens, while deeply appreciated on the roof, would have been worse than useless on the ladder, but the rungs were deathly cold even through the leather of his thinner pair of gloves.

He was pleased and impressed by Vedero’s arrangements on her flat bit of roof. She used the adjacent chimney both for warmth and as a windbreak, and she had a squat brazier in the shape of a toad to mark the opposite corner of her observatory. Between the two and the roof railings, there was enough room for four people, but only if they stayed very close together. Maia was glad it was Beshelar and Cala tonight, both because Cala was genuinely interested and because if he was going to be huddling into someone’s body heat, he’d rather it was one of those two.

The eclipse was beautiful and fascinating; all four of them ended up taking turns with Vedero’s telescope—a beautiful thing engraved like a unicorn’s horn. Maia commented on it, and she said, “It is a gift from our friend, Dach’osmin Tativin. She made the horn for her automaton, but found the telescoping was prone to retracting or extending itself at just the wrong moment.”

“An automaton? Of a unicorn?”

“Yes. Steam-powered—by a pipe from her furnace at the moment, for while she can get it to raise and lower its head, she has not yet figured out how to make it walk, so it does not matter that it is tethered to her study wall. She uses it as a coatrack—as she is very short, it is convenient for her to have a coatrack that will duck its head.”

“Truly?” Maia said, afraid that it was merely an elaborate joke.

“Yes,” said Vedero. “She will come to the court in the summer, when it is too hot for her experiments, and you may meet her. If you are not careful, she will show you all her drawings.”

“We should like that,” Maia said; Vedero looked at him sharply, but in the minimal light thrown by the brazier and by one dark lantern, mostly shuttered, he could not read her face.

He got her to talk more, in bits and pieces, about her friends and the work they were doing. One of her friends was translating the Barizheise poet Amu Carcethlened, who had written fabulous adventure tales about the voyages of the steamship
Lion of Orpezhkhahar.
Another friend was writing a treatise on the principles of inheritance as observed from her family’s millennium-worth of horsebreeding records. Another had started an unofficial school for girls with mazeise talents. There were others and others, and at some point Vedero said, “Of course, when we say ‘friend,’ we do not necessarily mean that we like the person particularly. We mean that they share with us the belief that women can and should do the same intellectual work as men.” Her shoulders were stiffly defensive, and Maia wondered what she expected him to say.

Except that he knew. She expected condemnation, or to be told that it was all very well for a hobby, but the only work women were fitted for was the bearing of children. He said, gently, “We would be honored to meet your friends—both those you like and those you don’t.”

She swung around so forcefully to stare at him that she nearly knocked Cala into the railings. “You are serious,” she said, not quite a question, but not quite a statement either.

“We were not considered worth educating, either,” Maia said.

She bowed her head and said, “We take your point, Serenity.”

It was not friendship he found with Idra and Vedero—either in the usual sense or in her particular sense—but it was something that was
like
friendship, kinship in a metaphorical rather than a literal fashion, something that was maybe as close as an emperor could get.

He found the beginnings of something similar with Dach’osmin Ceredin. She came up onto the dais in the Michen’theileian during the first ball held after Winternight, as everyone was dancing very cautiously and alertly, and said, “Serenity, why do you not dance?”

“We do not know how,” Maia said, and did his best to sound indifferent.

She considered him; none of the pity that Min Vechin had shown was visible on her face, only a kind of disinterested curiosity. “We could teach you, if you wanted.”

“Teach … us?”

She snorted. “We learned when we were five years old. We assure you, Serenity, it is not that difficult.”

“Thank you,” he said. “If it would not be a great bother to you—”

She shrugged impatiently. “What else is there to do in the winter?”

So another piece of time was carved out of the emperor’s schedule, like the three mornings a week he now spent learning equitation on Velvet’s patient back, and Csethiro Ceredin taught him to dance. She was a better teacher than he had expected, patient and funny and very clever about finding ways to explain things he did not understand. And gradually he learned not to trip over his own feet, gradually learned not to flinch every time their hands met. “By our wedding,” she said, “we will not be afraid to dance with you in public, Edrehasivar.”

“Please,” Maia said. He was standing close to her, one hand on her waist, the other holding one of her hands. Her other hand was on his shoulder, and he was as aware of it as of a burning brand. “My name is Maia.”

She was very still for a moment; then she looked up at him. She was not at all pretty, her nose too long and her chin too weak, but her eyes were sharp and full of light, and even of kindness. “And mine is Csethiro. It is probably good for a husband and wife to be on familiar terms with each other.” And then, with a pause he would have thought was mocking except that he was close enough to hear her nervous inhalation, “Thinkst thou?”

“Yes,” he said, and daringly turned her in the move she had just been teaching him. “I do think so.”

And she laughed with delight and said, “Not bad. Now let’s try the whole thing again, and this time remember that thy spine is not an iron rod.”

“Yes, Csethiro,” he said, and they grinned at each other all the way back to the top of the dance.

It was because of that new warmth between himself and his future empress that when he was petitioned for an audience by Min Nedaö Vechin, he did not refuse. He did not even tell Csevet to schedule her among his public audiences; instead, he received her in the Alcethmeret—although not in the Tortoise Room.

She was as beautiful as she had been the first time he saw her, although not quite so simply dressed; she had found patronage at court, then, aside from her maneuverings with him. He found that he was not resentful; he had learned too much about the way the court worked.

She approached the dais, curtsied exquisitely, and said without further preamble—or, indeed, waiting for permission to speak—“Serenity, we have come to apologize.”

He looked at her more closely, seeing past the armor of her clothes, the armor of her beauty. She was nervous, her color too high, her teeth catching at her lip: nervous and determined, and he realized with a sudden odd sense of kinship that she had blurted the words out—
rushed the fence
in the hunting cant he was learning to decipher—because she was afraid that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t manage to say them at all.

Forgiveness was on the tip of his tongue, but Csevet had finally taught him not to say anything in an audience without thinking it through, and by the time he was certain that, yes, he did forgive her, he had become curious. “What have you done that warrants an apology?” Because he knew why he thought she should apologize, but he had no idea if it looked the same way to her, if she was even talking about the same thing.

“Serenity.” She folded down onto her knees. “We knew that you were prepared to enter into a…” She hesitated, ears flicking, and said carefully, “a
closer relationship
with us, and we used that against you.”

“It was very much to our advantage,” he said, “for we did in truth need to speak to the Clocksmiths’ Guild.”

“No,” said Min Vechin, “that is not what we mean. It is not about the outcome, although we understand that the outcome is indeed felicitous. It is about what we
did.
” She looked up. “We should have asked you properly. Honorably.”

“You didn’t do anything dishonorable,” Maia protested.

“Only because you did not let us,” she said. “And so we must thank you, as well as apologize to you.”

Her words hung awkwardly, and then Maia felt his eyebrows shoot up. “You hadn’t … that is, we beg your pardon. Of course you had not.”

“Not all opera singers are—” Her voice cracked and she pressed the tips of her lacquered fingernails against her mouth.

Maia had a moment’s inadvertent imagination of what the scene would have looked like if he had said yes: two embarrassed virgins trying to pretend they knew what they were doing. And he still didn’t know what he was supposed to do about his nohecharei in that situation. “We were angry,” he admitted. “But we are not any longer.”

“We did not
think,
” said Min Vechin vehemently. “We wanted to help and we saw that we could, and we did not remember that you are a person, not just the emperor.”

“You were helping your sister,” Maia said, trying to be reassuring, but she shook her head.

“Mer Halezh,” she said, and the expression in her eyes said everything else.

“Oh,” said Maia. He remembered wondering if she were bored, during that long, slightly feverish conversation about the bridge over the Istandaärtha; now he knew she had not been.

“We have apologized to him, also. He has forgiven us.” Maia heard the wonderment in her voice, although whether it was over the forgiveness or Mer Halezh he could not tell and had—he reminded himself—no right to ask. “And we are returning to Zhaö to begin rehearsals for
The Tiger’s Bride,
but we had to apologize first. Because it was a rotten thing to do.”

The phrase was clearly one from her childhood; her accent deepened even as her voice lifted, and when she realized what she’d said, she blushed as deep a red as any rose.

“Min Vechin,” Maia said, and smiled at her. “We forgive you.”

She smiled back, and he knew that when she left for Zhaö, it would mean he had a friend there.

Idra, Csethiro, Nedaö, Vedero: instead of bulwarks, he began to feel that he had alliances, that his life—for perhaps the first time since his mother died—was not merely a matter of surviving from one hostile encounter to the next. It was strange to him, and he did not entirely trust it, so that when Thara Celehar asked for an audience, Maia granted it expecting the worst, even though he did not know exactly what the worst might be.

He was not reassured when Celehar appeared in the company of the Archprelate. The Council of Prelates had still not succeeded in choosing a replacement for the Witness for the Prelacy, and Maia was becoming more and more uneasy with the thoughtful way the Archprelate watched him in sessions of the Corazhas, especially as he could think of no reason for it.

“Serenity,” Celehar said, “we have come to ask a favor of you.”