Chapter 662: The Throne’s Voice

The Emperor came home for the winter with a tooth.

It arrived in the capital a day ahead of him, on a flat wagon drawn by twelve horses, under a tarpaulin that took eight men to lift, and the whole of the palace came out into the snow of the great courtyard to look at it. It was white and curved and longer than the wagon, and it was hollow at the root, and the hollow was big enough for a man to stand in. Anastasia stood on the steps with the courtiers and the secretaries and the guards, and looked at it, and thought of a carcass half a mile long lying in the slate-grey sea, and felt very cold.

Her father came the next morning, on horseback, alone, without escort. He rode in through the gates in the same plain coat he had worn when he left, with salt in his hair and his face brown from the sea, and dismounted in the courtyard beside the tooth, and put his hand on it, and laughed.

"Not the one," he said to nobody in particular. "Not even close. But it’s a start."

She went to the north gallery that evening, as she always did. He was at the long table, as he always was, and the charts of the western sea had multiplied again, and there was a new one pinned over all the others: a map of the coast, from the north ice to the southern fire, with small red marks scattered all down its length like a rash.

"Breaches," her father said, without looking up. "Since I killed it. Three times as many as before. Up and down the whole coast." He made another mark, carefully, with great satisfaction. "It woke things. Killing it. They felt it go, down there, and they’ve started moving." He sat back. "I’d hoped it would. It saves me looking for them."

Anastasia stood at his shoulder and looked at the rash of red marks. Saltreach was among them. So was a village on the north coast that Isaac had written to her about, in a letter that had come by falcon two weeks ago, where the harbor wall had been broken in half.

"People live there," she said.

"People live everywhere." He did not sound unkind. He sounded faintly puzzled that it needed saying. "That’s never been a reason not to do something."

She did not argue. She had learned long ago that arguing with her father was like arguing with weather. Instead she laid a single sheet of paper on the table beside his hand.

"What’s this?"

"Thessaly is calling the Accord," she said. "At Aelstrom. On the longest night. Every Palace that will come. The Church. Perhaps the Kingdoms of the East." She kept her voice even. "The Throne has a chair at that table. It has had one for three hundred years. Nobody has sat in it since your grandfather’s grandfather."

Her father glanced at the paper. Then, for once, he actually picked it up and read it.

It was very short. She had made sure of that. The Throne of Aurelia names its daughter, Anastasia, to sit in its chair at the Accord, and to speak with its voice.

He read it twice. Then he looked at her, and it was not the two-second look this time, the measurement taken and filed. It was longer. Much longer.

"Thessaly’s tea party," he said.

"Yes."

"They’ll want to talk about the sea."

"Yes."

"They’ll want me to stop hunting." He set the paper down. "They’ll say I’m waking things. They’ll say there’s a song, or a bargain, or someone at the bottom of the ocean who has been singing it lullabies for three hundred years, and that I’m ruining it." He smiled faintly. "Oh yes. I’ve heard about the singing. Ormond wrote to me from Hesket, before he sailed. It was the longest report he ever sent me, and the first one I’ve read in ten years."

Anastasia went very still.

"You knew," she said.

"I know a great many things. Most of them are boring." He picked up his red pen again and turned it over in his fingers. "Do you want to know what I think of the singing, Anastasia?"

She did not answer. He did not need her to.

"I think it’s the saddest thing I have ever heard," said the Emperor. "Three hundred years of children sitting in the dark, singing to something they couldn’t see so that it wouldn’t wake up and kill everyone they’d ever loved. And everyone up here forgot they existed." He looked at the rash of red marks on the map. "I’m not going to sing it to sleep. I’m going to find it, and kill it. And then nobody will ever have to sing to anything again."

"And if you can’t?"

"Then I’ll have had a very interesting death," said her father, "and you’ll be Empress, and you can sing to it yourself."

He picked up the paper she had brought, and took his ring off his finger, and pressed it into the wax at the bottom without hesitation.

"Go," he said. "Sit in the chair. Tell them whatever you like. Tell them I said I’m not going to stop, and they can come to the coast and stop me if they want to try." He handed her the paper. "Tell Thessaly I said hello. She’ll hate that."

She left for Aelstrom two days later, with her twelve guards and the paper in her coat and her blade at her hip.

On the first night on the road, at an inn on the coast, she sat by the window of her room and looked out at the dark sea for a long time. Somewhere out there, past the edge of the shelf, an old woman was sitting with her feet in the water. Somewhere further, a man she had once called her sword was standing on the far side of a fissure with a fox. Somewhere much further than that, her father was already planning his spring.

And in nineteen days, on the longest night of the year, she was going to sit at a table she had read about her whole life and never believed was real, and speak for the Throne of Aurelia.

She found that she was not afraid. She examined the feeling carefully, the way she examined everything, and found that it was true.

She was furious, though. She was furious at all of them: at her father, and at the Accord that had forgotten, and at the lords who had turned the Unbound away from their table three hundred years ago and written a law to hide it. She was furious in a cold, clean, steady way she had never felt before, and it sat in her chest like a second heart.

She thought it might be the first thing she had ever felt that was wholly her own.