Chapter 262: Chapter 262
Athea entered the throne room through the eastern door, the way she always entered it when the audience was private.
The wide doors of the formal approach were sealed. Two Royal Sentinels stood inside the antechamber as she passed, mirrored helms catching the high light from the stained glass above, and neither of them turned a fraction in her direction.
At the far end of the chamber, on a dais raised three shallow steps above the floor, Queen Athena Lumina sat in the weirwood throne.
There was a low chair placed eight paces from the foot of the dais.
Athea took it.
"Mother."
Athena lifted the Omni-pad resting against her thigh, glanced at it once, and set it on the small table beside the throne.
"Marshal Veyric sent a report at first light. The Ninth lost two squads in the recovery off the southern shelf. One of them was Captain Lyssa Erevan’s."
Athea took the name in. "That’s... a shame. I have known Lyssa Erevan. A serious girl who had become a serious commander." She said, "How?"
"A breach, smaller than the ones we’ve recorded before, sealed within the hour. The recovery was the part that cost us. Veyric will brief you on the specifics. I want the bereavement letters drafted before the end of the decad and sent under both our seals. The Ninth has earned the gesture."
The queen continued. "You will have them in your hand by Cycle-End."
Athena moved past the matter and then she leaned back into the throne. The motion was small, and it was not a motion her audience often saw her make, and Athea registered it precisely because of that.
"I am tired, Athea. Not physically, but mentally and somehow that feels worse."
"I know." Athea acknowledged.
You don’t. Not yet, but you will. I have been doing this for more than a century, Athea. After that long, your mind stops resting. Even when you sit down, even when the room is quiet, the work is still running in your head. I cannot remember the last time I had a thought that wasn’t about the Queendom. I would like to be done."
"How soon."
"That is not the question I want answered today. The question I want answered today is what kind of Queen you intend to be."
Athea did not speak. She had been asking herself some version of this question for some time.
Athena did not make her wait for the framing.
"When you inherit this throne. You will also inherit the Order with it. Every law in the Code you will be required to uphold, you have already broken. You hid a son. You manufactured an identity for him. You have spent all these years protecting the deception. By the time you take the throne from me, every protocol you will swear an oath to defend will already be a lie out of your own mouth."
She let the words sit there.
"So tell me, Athea. What kind of Queen does a woman like that make?"
Athea answered in her usual way of speaking, "The kind who looks at a son and sees not the law she broke, but what he is capable of being."
Athena’s eyes had moved to a point past Athea’s shoulder, to the closed eastern door at the far end of the chamber, and her head had tilted by the smallest degree, the way a hunting bird’s head tilted when something in the air had changed.
Athea stopped too, sensing something was off, their private meeting was not so private anymore.
A faint sound carried from the corridor beyond the door. It wasn’t Voices. Voices would have been blocked by the antechamber. Something smaller. The brush of fabric against the inner panel. A footstep, then a second, hesitating.
Athena’s right hand moved to the recessed panel set into the arm of the throne. She pressed two of the controls there in sequence, and a low note rose from somewhere behind the walls, soft enough that it might have been mistaken for the hum of the building itself, except that the quality of the air in the chamber changed at the same moment. The silence sharpened. Sound, if it left this room now, would carry only as far as the inside of the door before it died.
"Continue," Athena said.
★★★
Outside the throne room.
Aphrodite had reached the door by the simple expedient of walking up to it as though she belonged there.
The Sentinels in the antechamber had not stopped her. They had registered her, recorded the registration, and let her through because a princess of the blood had standing in the residential corridor that fed the eastern entry, and because the formal procedure for turning her back required an order they had not been given.
She had passed them with the same authoritative aura she used for guards and servants, the one that suggested they were beneath her.
The door itself had been the simple part. The complicated part was supposed to be the listening.
Aphrodite frowned, disappointed at herself that she was going to do this.
She was the princess Aphrodite and actions such as this, eavesdropping were so beneath her. But she couldn’t help herself; she was curious to listen in to them.
She set the side of her face against the door at the height she judged her grandmother’s voice would carry through, and held her breath, and waited for the rhythm of speech to resolve into words.
It did not resolve.
For a moment she heard the muffled cadence of a voice that was certainly her grandmother’s, and the answer of a voice that was certainly her mother’s, and then the cadence simply stopped. Not paused. Stopped. The way a piece of music stopped when the room it was being played in sealed shut.
She pressed harder. She closed her eyes. She tried, with the focused desperation she reserved for very few things in her life, to convince the door to give up something to her.
The door gave up nothing.
"Your Highness."
Aphrodite’s eyes opened.
The Sentinel had come up the corridor without making a sound, which Sentinels were trained to do, and was standing close enough that Aphrodite had to take a step back from the door to face her properly.
"I was looking for my grandmother," Aphrodite said, with the brightness she used for situations she had not thought through in advance.
"Her Majesty is in audience."
"Yes, I can see that." Aphrodite responded, smoothing her dress.
"Then I will ask Your Highness to step away from the door."
Aphrodite tilted her chin. The half-smile she had worn for the antechamber Sentinels did not work on this one, who was a different kind of Sentinel and held her gaze without any of the deference of a corridor guard.
"Do you know who I am."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"Then I am sure you understand that I am within my rights to wait for an audience with the Queen wherever in this palace I find it most convenient to wait."
"You are within your rights, Your Highness, to wait. You are not within your rights to wait against the door of a sealed audience. I am asking you a second time. Step away."
"You should think very carefully," Aphrodite said, "about how this conversation will be remembered when I describe it to my grandmother later."
"I will, Your Highness." The Sentinel did not move. "And when you describe it, you will please tell her that the Sentinel of the eastern post asked you twice to step away from a sealed door and offered to escort you to a sitting room of your choosing on the third request. Would Your Highness prefer the south solarium, or your own apartments?"
Aphrodite held the woman’s gaze for a moment longer, in the way one held the gaze of someone whose dignity could be neither bought nor inherited, and then she walked past her without an answer.
The Sentinel followed at the precise distance protocol required, and did not speak again, and the heels of Aphrodite’s slippers carried her down the corridor and out of the wing with the kind of brisk elegance that almost concealed the fact that she had been dismissed.
★★★
Inside the chamber, the air had not moved. The dampener hum continued at the same low frequency. Athea waited for the rest of Queen Atheas speech.
She was being reminded by the Queen of the chances she had to prevent the treason.
First was in the hour Athea knew that the child would be a male. And secondly she had it again in the hour he was born. She would have put an end to it but she chose not to.
Not only that but Athea had always had the opportunity to stop this and she made the same choice every time.
"You had a chance to put an end to him years ago, Athea," Queen Athena stated in a blunt tone.
