Empress of Autumn

The invitation arrived in Verais on a grey morning, sealed in gold wax stamped with the rising sun of the Lucenne Empire. Duke{{sub}} Veyron turned it over twice before he opened it, already certain he wouldn’t like what was inside.

He was right. You are cordially summoned to the Festival of the Two Moons, to be held across two months at the Imperial seat of Castelmere, in celebration of the Empire’s three hundredth founding…

He set it down on the breakfast table with the particular care of a man setting down something he’d rather throw in the fire

“No,” he said, before his sister had even asked. Lady Noelle Veyron looked up from her tea with the wounded patience of a younger sibling who has had this exact argument many times before and intends to win it eventually. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say you want to go.” “I was going to say I deserve to go. I’m twenty-two,{{sub}}. I have been to exactly one ball in my life and you spent the whole evening standing by a wall like a piece of furniture someone forgot to move.”

“I was guarding the door.”

From what? Joy?”

He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question that deserved one.

The truth — the truth he didn’t say out loud, because saying it out loud made it sound smaller than it was — was that{{sub}} had no patience left for courts. He had spent his twenties learning exactly

how much a smile could cost and exactly how little it was worth once you’d paid for it. He had watched his own betrothal dissolve into a transaction the moment a better offer came along, watched the woman he’d thought loved him marry a count

with deeper pockets within the same season, and had walked away from the whole arrangement called romance with the calm, settled conclusion of a man closing a ledger. It wasn’t grief anymore. Grief required ongoing feeling. This was just fact.

Love, as far as he could tell, was a story people told each other to make ambition more bearable

He did not believe in it. He had stopped believing in it on purpose, the way you stop touching a burn

But Noelle had spent her whole short life inside the walls of Veyron, raised by a brother who treated the outside world like a hazard to be managed, and she was right, and he knew she was right, and that was the worst part. “I won’t go without you,”

she said, softer now. “I’m not asking you to enjoy it. I’m asking you to stand in a room while I enjoy it.”

He looked at the invitation again. Two months. An eternity of music and forced conversation and the particular exhaustion of smiling at strangers

“Fine,” he said. “Two months. Then we come home and you don’t ask me again for a year.” Noelle’s answering smile was bright enough that, for a moment, he almost didn’t regret it

Castelmere was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when an

enormous amount of money has been spent making sure they look effortless. Gold leaf on the cornices. Fountains that ran wine on the first night. A ballroom with a ceiling painted to look like the sky was actually inside the building with you

{{sub}}noticed none of it, particularly. He noticed exits. He noticed which courtiers were watching him assess the room and adjusted his expression accordingly

— pleasant, unreadable, gone before anyone could pin him down for conversation. Noelle, beside him, was doing the opposite: eyes wide, drinking in every gilded inch of it, already being swept toward a cluster of young women who’d recognized a new face and wanted to know everything about it

He let her go. That was, after all, the entire point of coming

It was an hour into the welcoming feast before he saw the Empress

She was seated beside the Emperor at the high table, and{{sub}} first impression — uncharitable, automatic — was that she looked like a woman attending a

party she hadn’t been invited to, despite occupying the seat of greatest honor in the room. There was a stillness to her that didn’t match the noise around her

Not boredom. Something more deliberate than boredom — the practiced composure of someone who has long since stopped expecting the evening to include her and has decided not to let that show

The Emperor, meanwhile, was leaning rather pointedly toward a young noblewoman three seats down, laughing at something she’d said with the easy, performative delight of a man enjoying being watched

enjoying himself. Alaric had heard the rumors before they’d even crossed the border — Emperor Cassian Wynstone’s appetite for

young mistresses was not exactly a secret kept well. He hadn’t expected to watch it happen in real time, at his own wife’s table, on the first night of a festival meant to celebrate her empire as much as his

The Empress did not look at her husband. She had,{{sub}} suspected, gotten very good at not looking

“That’s Empress Margaux,” Noelle whispered, reappearing at his elbow with the speed of someone who’d already gathered three different rumors and wanted credit for all of them.

They say the Emperor barely speaks to her anymore. Lady Sorrel — that’s the one he’s talking to — has been at court for less than a season and already has rooms in the east wing.”

“That’s not our business,”{{sub}} said, though something in his chest had gone tight and irritated on behalf of a woman he had never met.

“I’m just saying. She used to be very beautiful, apparently. Before.” Before.

As if a woman’s face came with an expiration date stamped on the back like spoiled milk.

{{sub}}looked at the Empress again. She was, in fact, still beautiful — handsome in the way a well-built house is handsome, full of quiet architecture that took a moment to appreciate properly. Soft lines at her eyes that came from forty-seven years of living

rather than from any failure of preservation. A composure that the giggling girl in the east wing would need decades to even approach, if she ever did.

He found he didn’t like the casualness with which the entire room seemed to have decided she no longer mattered

It was, he told himself, simply an observation. He did not believe in love. He was not about to start believing in indignation on a stranger’s behalf, either

He believed that for almost three more days.He couldn’t sleep — a chronic condition, festival or no festival — and so he did what he always did when the walls of wherever he was staying felt too close: he walked

The east garden of Castelmere at midnight was nearly empty, lit by lanterns strung along the hedges and the considerable assistance of a very bright moon

He had nearly decided to turn back toward his rooms when he heard, from somewhere past the rose hedge, the unmistakable sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard crying

His first instinct was to leave. His second instinct — the one that had gotten him into more trouble over the years

— was to clear his throat loudly enough to announce his presence before he came any closer, so whoever it was would have the chance to compose themselves or vanish. She didn’t vanish. She turned,

and in the lantern light he recognized her immediately, and felt something in his stomach drop with the particular vertigo of having intruded somewhere he very much shouldn’t be

“Your Imperial Majesty.” He bowed, deep and immediate. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean—” “Get up,” she said, not unkindly, dabbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand in a way that suggested she’d rather he

hadn’t seen that either. “There’s no need for that. Not out here, in the dark, where no one’s keeping score.”

He straightened, uncertain. “Duke{{sub}} Veyron. Of Verais.”

“I know who you are.” She managed something that was almost a smile. “My husband’s seating arrangements are a small art form.

He likes to know exactly how far each guest is from anyone important.” A pause. “You’re quite far.”

“I noticed.”

“It’s not an insult. It’s a relief, if you want the truth. The closer you sit, the more he expects from you.”

She looked out at the hedges, composing herself with visible effort. “I apologize for the spectacle. It isn’t usually this undignified.” “There’s no spectacle, Majesty.

I saw nothing.” It was, he realized as he said it, a lie offered as a courtesy, and from the look she gave him — wry, knowing, grateful despite herself — she understood it as exactly that. “That’s a generous kind of nothing.”

She studied him for a moment, the way people study something they’re trying to decide is safe. “Why are you out here at midnight, Duke{{sub}}, if not to console weeping empresses?”

“I don’t sleep well at festivals. Too much noise in the daylight hours. It follows me into the night.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It’s been two months exactly, every decade, for my entire adult life,” he said. “I’ve made peace with it.”

Something in that — the dry, unbothered honesty of it — seemed to ease her

She gestured, almost absently, to the bench beside her, and it took him a moment to understand it was an invitation, and another moment to decide whether to accept it

He sat. Not close. A respectful, careful distance

“I don’t believe we’ve spoken before tonight,” she said.

“Most people don’t bother, after a certain point. I’ve become very good furniture.” “I noticed that, too,” he said, before he could stop himself. “I didn’t care for it.”

She turned to look at him properly then, surprise breaking through the careful composure for just a moment, and in the lantern light he saw — not the absence of beauty the rumors had

implied, but something else entirely. Something that had simply never been described to him correctly

“No,” she said slowly, like she was testing the words. “I don’t suppose you would.” Neither of them said anything else of

consequence that night. But neither of them left, either, until the lanterns had nearly burned down to nothing.He told himself, the next morning, that it had been a singular event. A strange midnight collision of two people who happened to be awake at the same hour,

nothing more. He had a festival to survive and a sister to chaperone and absolutely no intention of making a habit out of comforting another man’s wife in gardens

He held to this position for exactly four days, which he later considered something of a personal record.

It wasn’t that he sought her out. It was that Castelmere, for all its size, arranged its days with a predictable rhythm — morning rides, afternoon recitals, evening feasts

— and a man paying even modest attention could not help but notice where the Empress tended to be when she thought no one was paying modest attention to her. She walked the eastern gallery before breakfast

, alone, while the rest of the court slept off the previous night’s wine. She read in the small library off the rose courtyard in the hour before the afternoon’s entertainments began. She had, in other words, built herself a private architecture of small absences

inside a life that had stopped including her, and{{sub}} — who had spent years building something similar for himself — recognized it the way you recognize your own handwriting in someone else’s letter

He found himself, on the fifth morning, in the eastern gallery at the same hour. Entirely by accident, he told himself. He simply could not sleep, again, and walking required no particular destination

“Duke{{sub}}.” She didn’t look surprised to see him, which told him something he chose not to examine too closely. “Are we to make a habit of this?”

“I wasn’t aware we’d started one.” “No,”

she said, with the dry amusement he was beginning to recognize as entirely her own, distinct from the practiced pleasantness she wore for everyone else. “Neither was I. And yet.”

They walked. It was, he would think later, the easiest conversation he’d had with anyone in years — easier, certainly, than anything at the feasts, where every sentence had to be

measured for what it might cost him later. Margaux didn’t ask him about his lands or his income or his marriageability, the three questions every other person at Castelmere seemed contractually obligated to open with. She asked him what he read

She asked him whether Verais was as cold in winter as people said. She asked, eventually, why a man with no apparent interest in court had agreed to spend two months at the largest one in the Empire

“My sister wanted to come,” he said. “I don’t allow her to travel without me.” “That’s very protective.”

“It’s very necessary. She’s young. People are not always kind to young women traveling without family standing behind them.”

“No,” Margaux agreed, something flickering across her face too quickly for him to read. “They aren’t.”

He thought, but didn’t say, that people weren’t always kind to women who weren’t young, either — that he had watched an entire ballroom decide a woman didn’t matter anymore for the crime of having lived past forty, and that the unkindness

simply changed shape rather than disappearing. He suspected she already knew this better than he ever could.Courts notice everything, eventually. That is, after all, what courts are for.

It started as the kind of gossip that exists mostly to fill silences between dances — the Empress has been taking her morning walks with the Verais duke, have you heard — and{{sub}}

would have dismissed it entirely as harmless noise if he hadn’t watched Lady Sorrel’s eyes narrow at him across the ballroom one evening with the particular sharpness of a woman recalculating who held

influence in a room she’d assumed she understood.

Noelle noticed too, though she was considerably less subtle about it.

“You’re different,” she announced one evening, tugging off her dancing slippers with the relief of someone who’d spent four hours being charming on command

“You’ve stopped looking like you’re calculating an escape route every time someone speaks to you.”

“I haven’t stopped doing that.”

“You have, a little. Around her, anyway.” “Noelle.”

“I’m not saying anything bad,{{sub}}. I like her. Everyone who’s actually spoken to her likes her — it’s only the people who’ve decided she’s invisible from across a room who don’t.” She softened, some of the teasing

falling away. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. You’ve spent five years making sure nothing could touch you. I don’t know what happens if something finally does.”

He didn’t have an answer for that, because he hadn’t asked himself the question yet, and some part of him suspected he already knew he wouldn’t like the answer when it came. The Emperor, for his part, noticed nothing at all — or rather, noticed and didn’t care,

which{{sub}} found, the longer the festival went on, considerably harder to forgive than simple ignorance.

Cassian Wynstone was a man entirely absorbed in being admired; his wife’s company had simply stopped registering as a category of thing he needed to compete for, because he had long since assumed no one would bother trying

It did not occur to him, evidently, that this might be its own kind of insult — that a woman could be hurt as much by being so thoroughly dismissed as a rival that her husband felt no need to even notice her absence from his side

It was at the masquerade — the festival’s grand centerpiece, held at the height of the second month — that the dismissal became impossible for anyone in the room to ignore

The Emperor arrived with Lady Sorrel on his arm. Not subtly. Not in the careful, deniable way these things were usually managed at court, with separate entrances and a

respectable hour’s delay. He walked her in on his arm, in front of the entire assembled nobility of two empires, while his wife stood at the receiving line beside an empty space where a husband should have been standing

{{sub}}watched Margaux’s face. It didn’t crumple — she was, he understood now, far too disciplined a woman to let it crumple in public — but something in her

eyes went very still and very far away, the particular stillness of someone absorbing a wound and refusing to let the room watch her bleed. He crossed the floor before he’d entirely decided to

“Empress.” He bowed, formal, public, deliberate.

“Might I have the honor of the opening dance?”

It was, by every rule of the court he’d learned in his miserable youth, an enormous risk — a foreign duke claiming the

empress’s hand for the dance that should, by every tradition, have belonged to her husband. He saw the ripple of it move through the room, saw a dozen fans lift to cover a dozen whispering mouths.

Margaux looked at him for a long moment. Then she put her hand in his. “Yes, Duke{{sub}},” she said, loud enough for the room to hear. “I believe you might.”