Mack hesitated, glancing between the divan and its small wooden footstool. After a moment, he settled onto the footstool, knees jutting upward uncomfortably.
Good choice, Tasia thought as she settled onto the divan next to him.
Cole continued to study her from across the room. She busied herself with straightening her hair, but her baker’s girl disguise practically burned her skin beneath Cole’s steady gaze.
“An assassin?” said her father.
He widened his stance behind the desk, crossing his arms against his broad chest like a statue of a stern god. His stomach had rounded over the years, but his beard showed no grey. Dinner plate-sized hands were clenched into fists, and Tasia could see the muscles twitching in his forearms as he repeatedly squeezed and relaxed his hands — the only outward sign of tension he would allow himself to show.
Tasia cleared her throat. She met his eyes, intending to hold his gaze, but she couldn’t. She looked down at her own hands instead, folded and lady-like in her lap.
“Yes,” she said.
“Where?”
“The Ambassador Quarter. Not far from the Royal Canal.”
“Visiting Markas of House Boling again, I take it,” the Emperor grumbled. “I’m growing rather tired of this behavior, Natasia.”
“I know, Father,” she said, letting her gaze fall to the rug patterned with vines and flowers below. “I’m sorry. After tonight, it won’t — ”
“I don’t need your false promises,” said the Emperor. “But tonight is the end of your foolishness, even if I have to lock you in your quarters each night and hang any guard who lets you out.”
Tasia opened her mouth to protest, but Cole spoke before she could.
“Did you recognize him? The assassin?” The Commander of the palace guard’s gravelly voice was unhurried, seemingly unconcerned. Almost lazy, like they were discussing the unseasonably warm weather instead of an assassination attempt on the Princess. Tasia’s father often lost his temper, but Cole never did. The man was smoother than the silk of her finest gowns.
“No,” Tasia answered, “but he was a Wise Man — or at the very least, he was dressed as one.”
Tasia felt her father’s eyes on her, and she looked up, willing herself not to look away this time.
“Much the way you are dressed as a common servant?” he said.
She wouldn’t look away. She wouldn’t. “Yes.”
A noise emerged from the back of his throat; it sounded like an animal’s low growl.
Years ago, when Tasia was still just a girl, circus performers had been permitted to perform a series of shows at the palace. Tasia thought now of the lion the troupe kept caged in the inner courtyard for over a week. The creature paced between the iron bars day and night, snarling at anyone who came too close, giving Tasia nightmares when she imagined what he would do if he had somehow gotten out.
That was what the Emperor reminded Tasia of now — the caged lion, waiting for his opportunity to escape.
He turned on his heel, paced two steps, turned again, paced back to his original spot. A meaty finger jabbed at Mack.
“And you. My daughter says you stopped this would-be killer?”
Mack didn’t have the same determination as Tasia; his eyes fell away from the Emperor’s immediately. “Y-yes, Your… Emperor — Highness. Your Highness.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
“Me an’ my mate — uh, my patrol partner I mean, Dawkin is his name — we was finishing up our supper in the guard post in the Ambassador Quarter, the one just west of — ”
Cole interrupted. “Get to the point, guard.”
Mack turned on the wooden footstool towards Cole, seeming to notice him for the first time. Tasia could understand how he’d missed the head of the palace guard; the Emperor did tend to take up all the attention in a room, after all. Cole, on the other hand, had a way of making himself unseen. If the Emperor was a lion on display for all to see, Cole was a crafty tomcat, hiding in the bushes and waiting for prey to come to him.
Mack took in the criss-cross of scars across the Commander’s face, the scraggly dark blond hair, and seemed to grow a shade paler. He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing visibly.
“Yes — yes, sir,” Mack said. He stared at an indefinite point on the floor as he described running from the guard post to find a Wise Man with his knife raised high above what appeared to be a baker’s girl.
“And where is this man now?” said the Emperor.
“Dawkin took him back to the post, your… Emperor… ship.”
Cole turned to the Emperor. “It is the standard procedure of the city guard that when patrol pairs come upon a drunk or a rogue in the night, they hold them in their local post until the change of guard, when they can escort them to magistrate’s for safekeeping until sentencing.”
The Emperor nodded at Cole. “Go rouse some of your men — ones you trust to be discreet — and have them bring this supposed Wise Man here. You know where they should take him.”
Cole dipped his chin deferentially, rose from his seat. “Yes, Majesty.”
“And Cole… come back once you’ve woken your men. I have something else I wish to discuss with you.”
“Yes, Majesty,” Cole said, and cat-like as ever, he slipped soundlessly from the room.
“As for you,” the Emperor said, walking around his desk to address Mack, “you’ve done the Empire a great service tonight, you and your patrol partner. You saved the life of the future Empress, who will one day sit beside a husband who rules the Four Realms in the name of the House of Dorsa.” He stood a few inches from Mack, who still balanced precariously on the footstool, leaning slightly away from the most important man in the known world. “Many will say that the strength of an Empire comes from its Emperor, but in truth, we are only as strong as a single common soldier’s sword, only as rich as a single fruit merchant’s success. Do you understand, guardsman?”
Mack ventured a gaze in the Emperor’s direction before dropping his eyes to the floor again. “Yes, your Emperorship.”
The Emperor hovered above him for a moment, turned back towards his desk with a sigh. “It doesn’t matter whether you understand the point or not, guardsman. Your actions were enough for tonight. Go, now. Wait outside for Cole to return.”
Tasia offered Mack an appropriately gracious, regal smile, but he was too busy bowing and shuffling his way out of the Emperor’s office to notice her.
The Emperor waited for Mack to close the door behind him before addressing Tasia. He placed both palms on his desk, leaned over it before hissing, “Leaving the Ambassador Quarter mere hours before dawn? Even for you…” He pursed his lips, shook his head. “You leave me at a loss for words. And if two half-drunken, feckless city guardsman hadn’t happened upon you, you would’ve left me at a loss for a blood heir, too.”
“You have a third child yet alive,” Tasia said. There was bitterness in her voice, but she said it without lifting her eyes to the Emperor.
“Adela is a twelve year-old girl who prefers ponies and pageantries to politics.”
“And you think I prefer politics?” Tasia countered.
“I think that you remind me of your grandmother. At least you have the potential to make the clever wife of an Emperor. Your sister is too much like your mother. Bewitched by birds and flowers.”