Mouse sat at a desk in the corner of the Empress’s cabinet, working her way through a stack of parchments. They were contracts, petitions, totaling some thirty in all, by her estimation, and all wanting the Empress’s signature. However, the woman herself was too busy playing on her tafl board with her seneschal to mind the work that needed to be done, and so, as was often the case, the task of applying the royal signature fell to Mouse. “Idalia Aemilia Toth,” she scrawled carefully at the bottom of parchment before her. It was a signature that had become infinitely more familiar to her than her own and quite a deal more practiced.

  She set the parchment to the side, allowing the ink to dry, and turned to the next sheet. This one had to do with riparian rights in the lower part of the Gheny. Mouse read through the final clauses, ensuring that the appropriate changes had been made in regard to their discussion with Lord Wesmir. She glanced up at the Empress in momentary conjecture of whether the woman might not sign something herself before again blotting her pen, but what she saw then was not an Empress, not a sovereign, not some mighty ruler, but a dark-haired girl of nineteen who wanted nothing more than to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting down to a game of tablut.

  It had been a long and tiring day, one of audiences and meetings and conferences and so on, and while under such grievance the Empress often sought the bottom of her cups, on this particular evening, she had chosen to retreat to the solitude of her chambers where she sat listening to her seneschal as he regaled her with tales of yore, stories of the time he was ransomed in Belefoir and when he accidentally boarded a ship from Ips to North Elwich instead of Elwich Presque.

  On the rug next to the hearth, Peticru lay with legs stretched out, paws twitching in the invisible hunt. Mouse listened to the sound of the crackling fire, the low hum of the seneschal’s voice, the occasional burst of laughter from the Empress’s lips. It was not the cold, arrogant laugh that Mouse was accustomed to hearing; it was mirthful, melodic even.

  The Empress’s seneschal, a man more than twice her age, had been with her many years and had been allotted a greater portion of friendship than any of her ladies ever had. On the contrary, the young women of the Empress’s camarilla were little more than decorative, ornamental. They were game pieces, like the one the Empress held between her fingers now, elegantly crafted, but useless until such a time as they might be strategically deployed, their movements the result of careful machination.

  Mouse returned to the parchment before her, scrawling down the Empress’s signature and setting it aside to dry with the other. The next sheet was the beginning of a marriage contract, Agatha’s, as fate might have it. It detailed the terms of her union to Hildimar, what each side would receive and in what amount, and under what terms it might be dissolved. Mouse bristled as she read the words that would bind the girl forever to a man old enough to be her father and absurd enough to escape both affection and pity. Not only did she feel a profound sense of sadness, but she also felt guilt, shame. She had talked Agatha ‘round to reason when she was on the brink of absconding with her lover, and though she had believed, at the time, every word she had spoken, she now felt in more absolute terms responsible for the girl’s unhappiness. It was no wonder she had given Mouse the worry stone; she deserved it.

  Worst of all, thought Mouse as she thumbed through the parchments, was that there was nothing that stood to be gained from the union. There would be no alliance formed, no ties strengthened, no meaningful exchange of assets or titles. No, it had been arranged entirely out of spite, Agatha’s punishment for being too beautiful and too easily influenced for her own good.

  A burst of laughter came from the little table where the Empress and seneschal sat, causing Mouse to look up, and this was followed almost at once by a knock at the door, which the seneschal presently rose to attend to. Mouse continued to stare down at the contract in front of her, as if by reading it slowly enough, she might delay the inevitable.

  “Alfric,” the Empress cried out merrily, drawing Mouse’s attention away from her work.

  “Your Majesty,” the courtier replied, bowing his way into the room and crossing to the chair the seneschal had recently vacated. Mouse followed the man with her eyes. She had developed a distinct loathing for Lord Alfric, one that mirrored, in a way, her hatred of Johannes. It was the result of the impression created not only by his arrogance and condescension but by what she had come to recognize as his cunning, his deceitfulness. For as more time passed, she had come to suspect him of every bit as entangled in the affairs of Silver Lake and the subsequent persecution of Jasper as Johannes, and she now found him nearly every bit as deplorable.

  “Where have you been?” asked the Empress, greeting the finely dressed courtier with a gesture to the open seat opposite her, her seneschal having taken his leave. “I wanted you during that dreadful dinner with Lady Julia I was talked into. You would not believe how ugly her children are.”

  Lord Alfric lowered himself into the tasseled armchair, and just like that, thought Mouse, the girl had gone and the Empress had resumed her place.

  “As it happens, Your Majesty, I come from Lord Drakon,” Alfric said, and in reply to the Empress’s questioning gaze: “That duke on the Swahrtan border you absolutely despise.”

  The Empress raised a brow.

  “The one with the protruding jaw and practically nonexistent neck?” she asked.

  “The same,” replied Alfric. “And despite his jaw and his lack of a neck, he sends his warmest felicitations and expresses his deepest regret in not being able to attend the Feast.”

  The Empress narrowed her gaze.

  “He was not invited to the Feast,” she said.

  “Yes, and I believe that is what he regrets,” smiled Alfric. The servant now delivered a cup of wine into the hand of each, and Mouse, abandoning her glowering study of the courtier, returned to the document before her, leafing to the second page of clauses that detailed how the interest accrued on Agatha’s inheritance would be divided in the case that Hilidimar should sire more than one bastard.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  When she got to the last page, however, she found that she could not bring herself to sign it. For in doing so, she herself would become an instrument of subjugation. Instead, she carefully gathered up the sheets and shuffled them in among the rest, deciding that if she could not prevent the inevitable, perhaps she might delay it.

  She turned to the next petition. This one was a list of proposed appointments in Ahnderland, masterics to be precise. Ahnderland had been ruled over in much the same way as the rest of the Empire, that is, with the majority of wealth and influence being distributed over a large number of lords to prevent any one from amassing too much of either. The hierarchy was overall reflective of the relatively flat one that characterized Aros and served to centralize power, but the appointment of masterics would grant greater control to select individuals who could be trusted by the crown.

  The choice to make such appointments while Lord Marius himself was in the capital was obviously deliberate, and Mouse did not imagine that it had been arranged so that he might have some say in the matter. No, it was far more likely that he had been deliberately removed from his seat of power so that he could not do anything rash in reaction.

  “I had the pleasure of meeting a certain young man in Swahrta,” said Alfric, “a friend of yours, I think.”

  With this, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a small rectangular object which he presently handed to the Empress.

  “What is this?” the Empress asked.

  “That, Your Majesty,” Alfric replied, “is Darlen Mathis, or as you may better know him,” he resettled himself into his chair and smiled, “the Heir of Vejle.”

  Mouse could not help but look up from her work, her interest piqued by the mention of the name. The Heir of Vejle was one with which Mouse had grown intimately familiar in the past months as a most persistent and determined letter writer. In fact, he had written at least a dozen separate times asking for men, for gold, for anything the crown of Aros might offer in support of his cause.

  The Heir, as he called himself, was one of about eight bastard sons of Persephus who had made a serious claim to the throne, and with the King of Vejle now not far from his deathbed, things in Vejle were growing increasingly contentious. Persephus had sired some thirty or forty bastard sons in the least, but many of these were low born and would not be able to muster so many as a hundred men. The Heir of Vejle, however, had managed to gather eight thousand last Mouse had heard, a number very likely still growing. What was more, in relentlessly pursuing the Empress’s favor, he had proven himself to be bold and persistent, both of which were good qualities in someone looking to win a war.

  “Now, be careful with that,” said Alfric as the Empress studied what Mouse recognized now as a portrait. “I took it from Drakon’s niece, and she’ll likely be wanting it back. Apparently, Mathis has quite a reputation in that part of the world.”

  A smile played on the Empress’s lips.

  “And what, pray tell, were you doing with Drakon’s niece?” she asked.

  “Strengthening diplomatic relations, Your Majesty,” said Alfric, burying a grin beneath his mustaches. “All in service of the crown, I assure you.”

  The Empress laughed, setting the portrait aside and taking up a piece from the board.

  “He certainly is handsome, I grant you that,” she said.

  “Well, no bastard would have the nerve not to be,” interjected Alfric.

  “But tell me,” continued the Empress, “where precisely is this going? I know you like to be elusive, but I promise you that I do not find it half so charming as you seem to think I do.”

  The courtier twisted at the end of his mustache, a mischievous glimmer dancing in his eyes as he met the Empress’s.

  “I was thinking,” he said after a brief pause. “You’ve been having some trouble with that general of yours, have you not?”

  The Empress gave a murmur of discontent.

  “Well, what if this Mathis,” continued Alfric, nodding to the portrait, “this Heir of Vejle is the answer to your troubles?” There was a pause in which he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You see, here’s the thing,” he carefully chose a piece from the board, advancing it three spaces, “Ralist is a military man; he wants war. So, I say, give him one.”

  Mouse blinked in surprise at these words, turning her gaze quickly back to the work before her, lest she be caught staring at the courtier.

  “Send his men to fight for Mathis,” Alfric said. “He’ll get his war, and you’ll get your peace, and with any luck, some Vejlish bastard will cleave his head from his shoulders on the battlefield.”

  There was quiet now, as Mouse’s tried to force her attention to the petition in front of her.

  “Send Ralist’s men to fight for Mathis,” the Empress echoed.

  “Now, I know what you’re going to say,” said Alfric before the Empress could make any further remark. “We’ve signed an accord to stay out of the affairs of Vejle. And you’re right, it is a war we cannot afford to involve ourselves in. But Ralist has signed no such accord, and as a private citizen, he is free to do with his army what he chooses.”

  Mouse leafed through her stack of parchments, eager to distract herself. She was becoming terribly uneasy, a feeling of anxiety much like the one she had had at Silver Lake when she had overheard the conversation between the Dietric and the Empress beginning to take hold of her. Her eyes darted across the lines of script before her, desperate for something to latch onto, anything that might take her mind off of what Alfric was saying. And that was when her eyes fell on it.

  “Of course, the whole thing will have to be arranged by proxy,” Alfric was saying, “we cannot have any of it being traced back here. And not a word of it to the Council.”

  But Mouse was no longer listening. In fact, she was so absorbed in what lay on the desk in front of her that she would the General might have marched then and there and to declare war and she hardly would have noticed. The petition before her detailed a design to forward the installation of a chancellorship in the Chatti lands. This went against everything the Val had herself had been petitioning for, positioning the Chatti as direct subjects of the crown and their lands as a territory of the Empire, denying them, in the cruelest way, the freedom they were so desperately seeking. However, most disturbing of all was the fact that the person named to the position of chancellor was Johannes Ignacious Havener.

  The slow, steady sense of dread that had begun as a tightness in Mouse’s chest was now spreading throughout her entire body as she leafed through the pages. Johannes Ignacious Havener, she read the name again to make certain she was not imagining it, a man whose greatest achievement was bedding the Empress, was to be given rule of the Chatti lands. Mouse shook her head. She could simply not comprehend it. Johannes had no experience, no tutelage. He was not even a Toth.

  As Mouse turned to the last page of the document, she saw behind it a contract labeled as an amendment to the original petition, and as her eyes began to graze the page, she felt as though she was going to be sick. With trembling hands, she shuffled through the parchments, losing the contract she had just been reading in the stack. Accounting for the fact that Johannes Havener was not a Toth, he was to be made one by marriage, and that marriage, according to the contract that had been drawn up, was to Maudeleine Regina Toth.