The Day the Main Palace Was Lit
She had struck his hand away so hard that the pen flew from his grip and ink went spraying. Laniakea's hands and clothes were, of course, a ruin.
"Ah..."
Ink on a fine gown she almost never wore left her standing there blank, with no idea what she was meant to do.
Hyperion seemed no better. He spared not a glance for the pen still rolling across the floor. He only stared at her, dazed, and then, coming to himself a beat too late, caught her hand in a rush.
"I'm sorry. I..."
Even as he said it, he seized the stained hem of her dress and hovered there, utterly at a loss. Had Lucy not come in just then with the tea, the two of them might have gone on standing like that, staring at the mess and wondering what on earth to do with it.
"Your Majesty!"
Lucy all but hurled the serving cart into a corner and charged at Laniakea with the force of a buffalo stampede.
"Calm down, Lucy. I'm not hurt."
"Howbeit! I crave Your Majesty's royal discernment!"
It had been all well and good that she threw herself into her studies, declaring that now she was the Empress's maid she ought to work harder—but the book, it seemed, was rather old. Otherwise her vocabulary could not have leapt, all at once, more than a century backward.
Wiping what remained of the stain from Laniakea's hand with a handkerchief, Lucy turned and looked at Hyperion. The wariness in her eyes was plain to anyone. Laniakea hastily tugged her back.
"I told you, I'm fine."
So please, put that look away! She had been afraid open hostility might offend him.
"They said she was of the Lupin tribe... Loyal indeed."
Watching Lucy shield her, he looked somehow satisfied. But that was as far as it went. The smile left him at once, and he held out his hand toward Lucy, still bent over Laniakea's fingers—a wordless order to surrender the handkerchief.
However much Lucy put Laniakea first, she could not be willful even before the Emperor. Laniakea jabbed her in the side.
What are you doing? Give it to him!
With a look that said she had no choice, Lucy handed the handkerchief over. He had just smiled and moved to wipe the stain from Laniakea once more when a voice cut in.
"Your Majesty! So this is where you were! Everyone is waiting. If you would come to the council chamber..."
Signo stuck his head through the open door, brightened the instant he saw Hyperion, and called to him.
Hyperion's eyes went sharp.
"Tch."
He clicked his tongue, short and full of regret. Catching how cold that gaze was, Signo spoke again as if sorely wronged.
"You told me to grab them all in a hurry over the Riven matter—no, to summon them—and I only did exactly as you commanded..."
He had been on the verge of a truly tearful complaint when Hyperion's look grew colder still. Signo shut his mouth and quietly vanished back through the door. Even so, the business must have been urgent; from behind the door he went on urging that a great deal of the schedule still remained.
At the sound, Laniakea gazed quietly at Hyperion. Busy as she was, he was plainly busier—busier by far. That he had carved out the time to bring the contract at all was astonishing enough. She could hardly let him waste more of it wiping at ink. She caught lightly at the handkerchief in his hand.
"Please go. I'm not hurt, so you needn't concern yourself."
"But..."
"If it's the Riven clan, I think you ought to go at once."
The Riven clan was the house of the former empress. If he had summoned the ministers over that, it was surely the most important of all the matters now in his hands. He looked for a moment at Laniakea, who was telling him to go, then inclined his head slightly.
"I truly am sorry."
"I said it's all right. Lucy, will you help me?"
As if to show he need worry no further, she called for Lucy, and Hyperion, who had been hesitating, turned at last and left.
That had been two days ago.
Laniakea looked down at her hand. Lucy had scrubbed so hard it seemed she might take the skin off with it, and still the ink sunk beneath her nails was not entirely gone. Touching the stain that had spattered the contract then, she thought, I think I'll be all right. But will His Majesty?
Sharing a bed had been one of the things she had braced herself for from the day they married. But was the same true of Hyperion?
They said men can lie with someone even when their hearts aren't in it. All the talk she had overheard at banquets flickered past her again. Put together, it seemed everyone else managed well enough... Her gaze drifted to the nails where the ink still lingered. He disliked a mere touch enough to strike it away. Could he truly manage it?
Perhaps it was only because it was night. Any other evening she would have muttered that useless thoughts had gone far enough, that she was better off asleep, and climbed into bed. Strangely, thoughts of Hyperion kept catching on one another, one after the next.
He was remarkably generous about divorce. Perhaps that was because he already had some future in mind. For now he needed an heir in a hurry—to press down the former empress's faction, and at the same time to steady the imperial authority and make it firm. But would that still be true later?
Someday he might come to love someone. Then the empress he had now would only be in the way. Perhaps that was why he had said he would grant a divorce whenever she wished.
What sort of person might His Majesty like? Unlike the other princes, almost nothing was known of Hyperion. Of the Second, Third, and Fourth Princes, people had known everything—what colors they favored, what foods they liked, even the precise size to which one's steak had to be cut. Every scrap of trivia. Even so, aside from those who had been with him since the border, men like Signo, Laniakea was the one who knew the most about him. It was thanks to those few meals they had shared over three years. No one else had even had that brief a time in his company.
Turning over the handful of memories she possessed, she tried to imagine whom he might love. A dazzling beauty, of the kind the Second Prince had favored? Someone plain and quiet, like the Third? Or, like the Fourth, a fixation on a woman who already had a husband...
"Ugh..."
An unpleasant memory rose with the thought, and Laniakea swept the contract into the drawer with her arm. If she had time for thoughts like these, she was better off asleep a little sooner. The moment she opened her eyes, the busy schedule would begin again.
Slipping under the covers, she felt herself growing hazy, and thought that whoever Hyperion might marry again someday, it would not be a woman he startled at and flung away at the mere brush of a touch.
Time passed, and at last the day came to go to the Main Palace—the day the two of them would spend their first night. By imperial custom, the Emperor and Empress lived in their own palaces, but their bedchamber was in the Main Palace. The Empress's Palace, the Main Palace, and the Emperor's Palace stood joined in that order, and yet the Empress's Palace and the Emperor's Palace were plainly separate buildings. On any day they were not sharing a bed, they might go from morning to night without seeing each other's faces once. And so a story went around the Empire: that others measured the imperial couple's closeness by how often the lights burned in the Main Palace.
Well... if they were truly fond of each other, they simply crossed over into the other's palace, I hear. In a book of the Empire's unofficial histories she had once read, the first imperial couple had shut themselves inside each other's palaces for a month at a time and refused to come out, to the great distress of the ministers. They had also borne so many children that several of the annex palaces now standing within the Imperial Palace were said to have been built in those days.
Turning over such odds and ends, Laniakea rose from the bath in the Main Palace. To call it a tub was generous; it was nearer the size of a bathhouse. When she stood, the waiting maids hurried to dry her and dress her in her nightclothes. Watching them, she swallowed a sigh. Even she, who had almost never been waited on, could tell that their attendance was clumsy.
I'll have to see to this quickly. Of everyone employed in the Imperial Palace, Hyperion had sent out all but the maids and menservants who handled ordinary chores. The act itself was not strange. When an emperor changed, it was only natural—established custom—that the palace staff changed with him. The trouble was that this empress had been forced to leave as if driven out, and because of that the work of the Imperial Palace, the Empress's Palace above all, had never been properly handed over before most of the staff were replaced.
I have to choose ladies-in-waiting at once. Lucy had become a maid, but she could not do every task alone, and there was much she lacked. From the start she had come not as an ordinary maid but as a guard. Capable people were badly needed, yet she could not simply take anyone. Applicants came with letters of recommendation from the various departments and houses, but even among them she would have to choose whom to bring in. Had she been the wife of some other prince, it would not have been so difficult. She would have held banquets, cultivated the people of society, and been told who was suited to the work. But Laniakea, never active in society and intimate with no one, had nowhere to obtain such information.
The worry followed her even after she entered the bedchamber. If the Empress's Palace was to function as it should, this, above all, was a matter that had to be hurried. And there's no one I can even consult.
It was in that very moment.
"Laniakea? What has you thinking so deeply?"
At the sudden sound of Hyperion's voice she started and lifted her head. What met her eyes was a man's chest—firm, and still damp.