A Seat of Thorns
At that same hour, the Emperor's Palace was crowded as well, thick with people coming and going. There was none of the warmth that filled the Empress's Palace.
The border knights who had kept watch around Hyperion ever since the funerals of the princes and the Late Emperor stood sentry with flashing eyes, and if any voice rose even a little they turned at once and fixed the speaker with a cold stare. Those gazes were so savage that the ministers and officials passing through the Emperor's Palace flinched in spite of themselves and clamped their mouths shut.
But the knights' eyes were not the only reason they walked with such care.
"I must say, this feels rather like sitting on a cushion of thorns."
One minister addressed another who happened to be entering beside him. The other nodded as if in agreement, then lowered his voice.
"For the time being, we have no choice but to watch our step."
The people moving through the Emperor's Palace could be divided, broadly, into two factions: the new nobility, who had helped Hyperion ascend so swiftly, and the old nobility, who had been close with the Dowager Empress.
They were not split simply into a pro-Emperor camp and an anti-Emperor camp, for even within each group their positions differed sharply. The new nobility could, for the most part, be counted pro-Emperor. The old nobility were harder to brand anti-Emperor. They had treated Hyperion coldly in the past, yet now they were clawing desperately to win his trust.
Even so, they could not approach the Emperor rashly. When the Dowager Empress had driven the young prince out to a harsh frontier on every pretext she could devise, not one of them had tried to stop her. They had all told themselves there was nothing to be done. Before a Dowager Empress swollen with the ambition to seize power in her own fists, taking the side of a young prince who had no power at all would have gained them nothing. And the prince they had looked past, thinking so—who could have known he would suddenly become Emperor, simply because the other three princes died on the same day, at the same hour?
"Even so, we are fortunate His Majesty has recognized our loyalty and our ability."
At those words, the other minister's face brightened a little.
When Hyperion first took the throne, every one of them had gone cold with fear, certain they were already dead. Yet he exacted no revenge upon them. Not that the court had been left untouched. Every minister of the Dowager Empress's house had been dismissed. They had not been cut away merely for belonging to her faction.
Trusting in the Dowager Empress, their own kinswoman, they had indulged in a corruption so blatant that even the other ministers frowned to see it. They ignored the law as a matter of course, and they falsified the taxes they owed until evasion was little more than habit. The wealth piled up in that fashion was staggering. Hyperion had cut them out first of all. They had never imagined the new Emperor would strike without a moment's hesitation, and before the knights who burst in bearing an order sealed with the imperial signet, they could do nothing at all.
But that was as far as it went. Once he had removed those whose collusion with the Dowager Empress ran deepest, Hyperion punished no one else. The posts left vacant by those who withdrew from the Imperial Palace of their own accord were filled by the new nobility, though not in any haphazard rush.
"His Majesty prizes ability above all else. That would explain it."
Those newly brought in had, every one of them, proven their worth. And so the Emperor's Palace, no less than the Empress's Palace, had become a place where all bent their full strength to proving they were of use.
The ministers who had stepped inside spoke less and less the nearer they drew to the Emperor's office.
When Hyperion had first appointed them, they had been unable to hide their smiles.
A green boy, only just made Emperor. We thought a fledgling like that would be easy enough to cajole.
What could a man know who had spent nearly his entire life outside the palace? Set before the ever-mounting affairs of state, he would have no choice in the end but to beg the ministers for help.
Or so they had thought.
Anyone looking at him now would take him for a prince who had been eyeing the throne since childhood.
Even the Second, Third, and Fourth Imperial Princes, the Dowager Empress's own sons, had lacked Hyperion's capacity to oversee the governance of the realm. Finding it strange, someone had put the question to him in a roundabout way.
"Though you were far from court, you seem remarkably well versed in the conduct of state. When did you learn it?"
He had looked at the minister as though the man had asked why anyone would question the obvious, and answered.
"Is it not the standing principle that every prince and princess must never neglect their studies, so that they may take part in governance at any time? I have simply gone on studying."
No one had asked because they did not know the principle. What they had wanted to know was how he had learned it in a place so wretched he might have died by the next day. But there was no one tactless enough, or stout enough of heart, to press him any further. And in the same moment they all remembered something else. Before he left the Imperial Palace, his tutors had praised him until their mouths ran dry, calling him an exceptionally brilliant prince.
Come to think of it, he had scarcely any support from the imperial house, and still he kept good relations with the lords of the north and maintained his knight order.
That alone had been proof of the First Imperial Prince's brilliance and his political skill. But they could not simply nod, persuaded, and let the matter rest. Why were they all laboring like this, and still giving their loyalty to the new Emperor? Because they hoped that beside a new and formidable power—one who would rule for decades yet to come—they too might enjoy wealth, rank, and glory. And if the Emperor himself proved too difficult to handle, there was only one answer.
We target the Empress.
How unfit the present Empress was to stand as Empress of the Empire. There were, however, two reasons they had not yet moved against her. The first was that the Emperor was looking after her far more carefully than they had imagined. It was not enough that he stayed with her in the Main Palace without fail. Rumor had spread that he sent flowers to the Empress's Palace every single day. In a climate like that, there was nothing to be gained by making it plain that they meant to check the Empress, see her gone, and raise in her place a woman of their own choosing.
He's mad for her now, of course. He doesn't seem to have kept a woman in the north, so isn't it only natural he'd lose his head over the first one he took to bed?
Besides, the Empress was of the fairy folk, and beautiful even to their eyes. Small wonder the Emperor had lost his senses over her all the more. Lay a hand on her wrongly now, and it would be they who stood in danger.
Beauty lasts only a moment. In the end, a man has to make a political choice.
For the present he might take his pleasure, blinded by that beauty. It would not last. That was precisely the second reason they held back. The more time passed, the more surely the Empress would expose how little she truly amounted to. That the Dowager Empress had taught the reigning Empress nothing at all was a fact known to everyone. If the mistakes and the incompetence went on, the Emperor would come to see it. And he would grow sick of her. So for now, there was nothing to do but hold their breath and wait.
The coronation is soon enough, anyway.
However many maids they hired anew, however hard those maids worked and prepared, it would be difficult for the coronation banquet to conclude without a flaw. To demand perfection of an affair that vast was unreasonable from the start. Even in the Dowager Empress's day, banquets had brought all manner of unforeseen problems to light. That they had nonetheless appeared flawless was only because people knew the faults and chose to overlook them. But at this banquet, no one would keep silent for the reigning Empress's sake.
They might not be able to shame her openly, but neither would they cover for her. The moment there was something worth finding fault with, the whispering would begin at once. And so, as one banquet followed another, the Empress would be taken to task for her mistakes again and again. That would bear directly upon the Emperor's own authority, and in the end he too would come to see her as pathetic.
In the end, it's only a matter of time.
Irritation roughened Hyperion's mutter.
Signo broke into a cold sweat as he listened.
In truth, had Hyperion wished to kill them before his accession, he could have killed them all. His knight order was made of men who would die without a moment's hesitation if Hyperion ordered them to die. And the knights of the Imperial Palace, who had lived their whole lives in peace upon those men's sacrifices, were hardly of a skill to cross blades properly even once with Hyperion's order.
I was sure he'd sweep the whole lot away in one clean stroke before he ever took the throne.
Hyperion had not. With a restraint so mild it was almost absurd, he had cleared away only what had rotted past saving, and then he ascended. Signo, who knew the man's true temper, found it nothing short of unbelievable.
It must all be thanks to Her Majesty the Empress.
He had probably held himself back because he could not bear for her to see blood. So why, ignorant of even that, did the ministers keep trying to lay hands on the Empress?
Signo was drawing breath for another heavy sigh when Hyperion asked,
"More to the point. The Dowager Empress?"
At the words Dowager Empress, Signo's face tightened with tension once more.
"It seems she has finally come to her senses. We have confirmed that she is gathering the people of her house at her own estate."
Watching Hyperion's expression, Signo went on.
"Strangely, though, I am told she is showing more hostility toward Her Majesty the Empress than toward Your Majesty."