The Great Pretender

written by @_cranthir

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The court named her Empress, and so she became one.

Not all at once, and never wholly. Some things could not be remade by jewels and silk and whispered instruction in candlelit chambers. A woman might learn another’s gait, another’s hand upon a cup, another’s tone when speaking to lords who bowed too low and ladies who listened too sharply. She might bind her hair in the proper fashion, wear the proper colours, lower her lashes at the proper hour, and answer to a name that had first belonged to another.

Yet there remained certain things no tutor could force into being. Kindness, for one. Gentleness, for another. Those came of themselves.

And these were the very things that undid Vierros Alzari most completely.

In the first weeks, he could scarcely bear to be in the same room as her.

He was ever courteous, for he had been born courteous and could no more cease to be so than the moon could cease to pull upon the tide. He thanked her when she poured his tea. He rose when she entered. He enquired after her comfort with that soft, low voice of his which made all others fall silent in order to hear him. Yet he would not look at her overlong. When she smiled, he seemed almost stricken by it; when her hand brushed his sleeve, he stiffened as though touched by holy fire.

She knew why.

The dead walked between them, though only one of them wore her face.

So she did not press him. She had lived long enough among danger to know the worth of quiet patience. It was not in her to be cruel, even if cruelty might have made the thing simpler.

She moved through the palace as gently as she might. She learned Avaras’s lessons so that she might hear the child recite them over supper. She learned which servants were shy and which liked a jest. She learned that the Emperor forgot meals when left alone with law-books and decrees, and that his councillors, though loyal, were too frightened of his station to bully him into rest.

So she took that burden upon herself.

On the fourth night of rain in September, she found him in the western study, half-hidden beneath a wilderness of parchment.

The chamber was close with the smell of ink, lamp oil, and wet stone. Moonlight pressed faintly at the high windows, paling against the storm. The Emperor sat bent over his desk in black and crimson robes, his hair unbound and falling in immense lengths about him like a river at midnight. One pale hand rested upon a decree still unfinished. The other had gone slack around his pen.

He had fallen asleep sitting up.

There was something in the sight so unguarded and so forlorn that her breath caught softly in her throat.

He looked younger thus, though age did not sit upon his kind as it did upon others. His lashes cast faint shadows upon his bone-pale cheeks. His lips, usually set in thought or apology, had parted the smallest little bit in sleep. Ink stained his fingertips black, as if he had dipped them into night itself.

On the desk beside him stood a tray untouched: cooled broth, sliced figs, little roasted beetles glazed with spice and honey, and a dish of crisp silverfish. The bread had gone hard.

She stood for a moment beneath the lamp, regarding him with a tenderness that was by then becoming dangerous.

Then she set down the mending basket she had brought and crossed to him.

“Your Imperial Majesty,” she said, barely above a whisper.

He did not stir.

A little smile touched her mouth. “My lord.”

Still nothing.

Very carefully, she laid her hand upon his shoulder.

He started at once, waking with a breath drawn sharp through the teeth. His black eyes flew wide, and for a blink he looked not like the Emperor of Ederav but merely a scholar caught dreaming in his books.

“I beg your pardon,” he said immediately, sitting upright so swiftly that a paper slid from the desk to the floor. “I had not meant—I fear I have been discourteous—”

“Hush,” she said, before she could stop herself.

He went silent at once.

It struck her then, not for the first time, how easily he yielded when spoken to gently. Others obeyed because he wore the crown. Vierros obeyed softness as though starved for it.

“The fault is not yours,” she said, and set the fallen paper aright. “You were weary.”

“I ought not to have slept.”

“And yet you did.”

A faint flush, scarcely more than a bloom of rose beneath snow, rose upon his cheeks. “You are kind to say so.”

“I am saying the plain truth.”

That seemed to trouble him even more.

She had learned this, too. Praise embarrassed him. Concern embarrassed him. Affection, however small and harmless, left him looking as though he had been handed some priceless treasure for which he had not asked and could not possibly pay.

His gaze moved then to the tray, and a shadow of guilt crossed his face. “I forgot again.”

“Yes.”

“I did not mean to.”

“I know.”

“I was finishing the revisions on the grain levy for the northern provinces, and there were errors in the first draft, and then a petition from the healers of South Aschatava, and then—”

“And then,” she said, “you forgot that even emperors must eat.”

He lowered his head a little. “I am sorry.”

At that, she laughed very softly.

His eyes lifted to her, startled. He always seemed startled when she laughed, as though he had not yet grown used to the sound.

“You apologise to me for your own hunger,” she said.

“I have inconvenienced you.”

“You have inconvenienced only yourself.”

He might have argued, but she had already taken up the bowl of broth. She warmed it over the little brazier and set it before him, and because he was, beneath all his state and solemnity, only a well-bred and shamefaced creature, he accepted it.

She sat opposite him with her embroidery frame while he ate.

This, too, had become a habit between them. He would work late; she would remain, sewing by lamplight. Sometimes she mended his sleeves where the cuffs had frayed from too much use. Sometimes she embroidered small moon-motifs upon collars and hems, subtle as secrets.

Once, when he had timidly admired the work she had done upon Avaras’s winter cloak, she had begun a new robe for him in dark red wool with black lining and silver stitching along the hem.

He had stared at the folded cloth upon her lap as though it had been a love confession.

“It is only a robe,” she had said then, smiling.

“It is not only a robe,” he had answered, almost in distress.

Now he sipped the broth and watched her needle move through fabric.

She could feel his gaze, though he dropped it whenever she looked up.

At length he said, “You need not remain awake on my account.”

“I know.”

“You have been with Avaras all day.”

“Yes.”

“You ought to rest.”

“So ought you.”

He looked down into the broth as if it might provide a wiser answer than he could.

The silence between them was not empty. It had not been empty in a long while. Once it had been made of guilt, fear, and careful pretence. Now it was made of something softer, and therefore far more perilous.

Outside, rain whispered against the windows. Within, the fire murmured low.

She set aside the embroidery for a moment and reached across the desk to take the empty bowl from his hand. Their fingers brushed.

He drew breath.

It was the smallest thing, and yet it passed through him plainly, visible as candlelight through thin silk.

She ought to have pretended not to notice. Instead she asked, gently, “Does it still pain you?”

He stilled.

One would not have thought so quiet a man capable of such depths of stillness. When he wished it, he could become almost statue-like: pale, beautiful, and unreadable as carved stone.

“At times,” he said at last.

She knew he did not speak only of the old hurt done to his body by harsh words and harsher hands. Nor only of the memories he carried like hidden blades. In his court people called him fair, wise, beloved, chosen of the gods. Yet in private he bore himself like a man forever awaiting the moment someone would look too closely and find him wanting.

Her heart ached for him with such force that she had to lower her eyes.

She resumed her stitching, if only to keep her hands steady. “You have not worn the blue robe in some time,” she said. “The one with the silver fastening.”

“It is too fine for common use.”

“It was made for you.”

“Precisely.”

She smiled to herself. “Then I shall make this one plainer.”

His lips twitched, almost a smile. “That may not save it.”

She glanced up. “No?”

“No.” He looked at the cloth in her hands, and his voice became quieter still. “Anything you make is too precious for common use.”

For a moment she forgot how to breathe.

He seemed to realise, belatedly, what he had said. The colour rose swiftly into his face, all the way to the tips of his ears. He turned his head aside at once, as though the shelves of law-books were suddenly of urgent interest.

“I beg your pardon,” he murmured. “That was forward.”

“It was not,” she said, though her own cheeks had grown warm.

He shook his head, mortified. “I did not mean to place a burden upon you.”

“A burden?”

“My words. My regards.” His fingers tightened against the edge of the desk. “I know the circumstances by which you came here. I know what was taken from you. I would not add to it.”

Taken from you.

He would never say I took. Even now. Even with no one to hear.

She set down the embroidery frame altogether.

“My lord,” she said softly, “look at me.”

He did, though with visible effort.

How strange it was, she thought, that so many in the empire feared those eyes. They were black as the space between stars, yes, and empty of all reflected light; yet whenever he looked at her in earnest, there was nothing terrible in them. Only a great and careful sorrow. Only gentleness. Only hunger held nobly in check.

“You have never been a burden to me,” she said.

His throat moved.

“You have been patient with me,” he answered.

“That is not the same.”

“You have given me more grace than I deserve.”

She smiled then, though sadness touched it. “There you are mistaken. We are very much alike in this one thing.”

He frowned faintly, not understanding.

“You think yourself forever in my debt,” she said. “And I think myself forever in yours.”

His gaze faltered.

“It was your law that fed my brothers,” she went on. “Your healers that treated my sister when fever nearly took her from us. Your granaries, your alms, your reforms. I had not seen the inside of a noble house until I came to this palace, but I knew your name long before that. In the quarter where I lived, mothers blessed you over empty pots and meant it. Men who had cursed kings all their lives spoke of you with hope.”

He stared at her as if she had begun speaking some strange and sacred tongue.

“I am here because of dreadful things,” she said. “That is true. I have lost much. That is true as well. Yet do not insult me by calling every tenderness between us pity, or duty, or repayment. I know my own heart better than that.”

At this he went very still indeed.

The lamp flame shifted. Rain sighed on the glass.

When he spoke again, his voice was scarcely more than breath. “Your heart.”

She ought perhaps to have withdrawn the words, made them smaller, dressed them in jest. Yet she was weary of both of them creeping round the edges of what had already grown too large to hide.

“Yes,” she said simply.

He looked as though she had placed the moon in his hands and he feared to drop it.

“I had thought,” he said slowly, “that if I were very careful, and asked nothing, and expected nothing, then perhaps I might be permitted the happiness of your presence without profaning it.”

The fondness that rose in her was so fierce it almost hurt.

“Vierros,” she said.

He shut his eyes at the sound of his name upon her lips.

No title. No formality. Only him.

When he opened them again, there was such naked yearning in his face that she could no longer mistake it for anything else. This was no emperor before her. This was merely a lonely man, brilliant and burdened and soft-hearted, who had spent too long believing love must always come barbed.

She rose from her seat and went to him.

He half-rose also, uncertain, and nearly upset the inkwell in his haste. She caught it neatly before it fell.

A sound escaped him that might almost have been a laugh, had he not been so overcome.

“There,” she murmured. “You see? You are not the only one who may save a decree from disaster.”

The corners of his mouth trembled.

She set the inkwell aside. Then, very slowly, giving him every chance to retreat, she lifted her hand and laid it against his cheek.

He leaned into it at once.

Not boldly. Not greedily. But with the quiet, helpless instinct of something long denied warmth.

Her breath caught.

His skin was cool beneath her palm. He did not look away. The black of his eyes seemed deeper than midnight, and yet she could read every tender ruin in them.

“I am not she,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“You need not speak to me as though I might break.”

“I know.”

“You need not apologise each time I am kind.”

He made the tiniest, most pained little smile. “That may prove beyond me.”

She laughed again, softer this time. “Then I shall endure it as best I can.”

At that, something in him yielded.

He bowed his head, and with a care so reverent it might have been prayer, he took her free hand and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist.

It was no grand courtly kiss. It was smaller, stranger, dearer: a trembling act of devotion from a man who could command armies and yet looked undone by the simple privilege of touching her.

Her fingers shook.

“Do not do that,” she said, though without conviction.

He lifted his head at once, stricken. “Forgive me.”

She smiled helplessly. “Not because I dislike it.”

The blush that overtook him then would have made his brother insufferable for a month had he been there to witness it. It ran bright across cheek and throat, and he looked so adorably discomposed that she nearly kissed him then and there out of sheer affection.

Perhaps he saw the thought upon her face, for he went utterly motionless.

“My lady,” he said, in the tone of one standing upon the edge of some high and holy precipice.

She slid her hand from his cheek to the fall of his hair, smoothing one dark strand back behind his ear. “You are blushing again.”

“I fear,” he said faintly, “that I am often at your mercy in this regard.”

“And do you dislike it?”

“No.”

The honesty of it, quiet and immediate, made her heart turn over. “No,” he said again, a little stronger. “I do not.”

So she bent and kissed him.

Only once, and lightly, at the corner of his mouth. A kiss so soft it might have been mistaken for breath.

He stared at her.

Then, with all the gravity of a man accepting a sacred vow, he lifted a shaking hand to her waist and kissed her properly.

It was not practised. Whatever poetry he wrote in secret, he did not kiss like a libertine. He kissed like a scholar encountering for the first time a text too wondrous to trust his own reading of it. Careful. Astonished. Devout.

When they parted, he rested his brow against hers.

She could feel the unsteady rhythm of his breathing. For a long while neither of them spoke.

At last he whispered, “I have written of this.”

She smiled. “Have you?”

“Not well.”

“I do not believe that.”

His mouth curved, barely. “There was once a poem.”

“A poem?”

He hesitated. “It was… unsuited for wider reading.”

Now she laughed outright. “Unsuitable?”

He looked miserable at once. “It was discovered.”

“By whom?”

He closed his eyes. “By the Halcord.”

She had to turn her face aside, lest her laughter prove unkind. “Oh, my poor lord.”

“I did not leave my chambers for six days.”

“Only six?”

He looked at her then, offended in the mildest and most endearing fashion. “I had state matters.”

That undid her entirely.

She laughed until tears sprang to her eyes, and though embarrassment still lit his face, something freer entered his own expression as he watched her. Wonder, perhaps. Relief. The beginning of joy.

When at last she quieted, she touched the silver scales pendant resting against his breast.

“And yet,” she said, “for all your laws and balances and decrees, you are terribly unfair.”

“How so?”

“You make me love you more each time you speak.”

The words escaped before modesty could recall them.

He stared. Then he made a sound she had never heard from him before: a soft, breathless little noise of disbelief, as though he could not fathom how the world had turned so merciful.

“You must not say such things lightly,” he whispered.

“I do not say them lightly.”

His eyes shone darkly in the lamplight. “Then the gods are crueller than I feared.”

Her hand tightened upon his sleeve. “Crueller?”

“For granting me what I had not dared to beg for.”

Tenderness nearly broke her in two.

“You foolish, lovely man,” she murmured.

At this he gave a helpless, shy smile so sweet and sudden that she thought no crown in all Ederav could rival it.

Beyond the door, footsteps passed distantly down the corridor. Somewhere in the palace a clock rang the late hour. The rain was easing.

He drew back only enough to look at her properly.

“There is something I have long wished to ask,” he said.

She felt, for an instant, that old shadow pass between them. Not fear. Never that, not now. But the memory of all she had buried.

“What is it?”

His gaze softened. “What would you have me call you, when we are alone?”

She looked down at their joined hands.

There had once been another name. It belonged to a narrow room, to cheap perfume, to nights too long and winters too cold, to laughter shared in hunger with brothers and sisters huddled close. It belonged to the girl who had watched the grand people of the city from far below and imagined them fashioned of some different flesh. It belonged to someone who no longer existed anywhere but in memory.

She had buried that name herself. No one had forced it from her. To speak it now would be to call a ghost back into a body that had already been made to house enough ghosts.

So she lifted her head and said, with quiet certainty, “Call me what you most wish to call me.”

He looked at her for a long while, searching her face as if for any sign of reluctance. Finding none, he bent and pressed his lips to her knuckles.

“Ananti,” he said.

The name fell between them softly.

Not the dead woman’s name. Not her lost one. Something gentler. Something hers because he had spoken it as though it were precious.

She smiled, and by the look that came over him one might have thought sunrise had broken in the study.

“Very well,” she said. “And when we are alone, I shall call you Vierros.”

His blush returned at once. “You are merciless.”

“No,” she said, stroking a thumb over his ink-stained fingers. “Only devoted.”

That silenced him more surely than any command.

He looked down at their hands, then back at her, and all his strange solemn beauty softened into such open affection that she wondered how anyone had ever found him frightening. He was beautiful, yes, in that pale and unearthly way of his bloodline; but beauty was the least of him. His true loveliness lay here, in the terrible care with which he held everything entrusted to him, even when he believed himself unworthy of holding it at all.

A knock came faintly at the outer door.

Before either could answer, a familiar voice called through the wood, rich with amusement.

“Brother? Are you still buried beneath laws and misery, or may ordinary mortals enter?”

Vierros shut his eyes.

Ananti bit her lip.

The door opened a hand’s breadth, and Jaerros Alzari put in his head, all grin and gleam and insufferable younger-brother delight. His gaze moved from Vierros’s flushed face to Ananti’s warm one, to their very obvious proximity.

Then he smiled like a man discovering gold in his garden.

“Ah,” he said. “I see. I shall come back later, then.”

“Jaerros,” said Vierros, in a tone of profound warning.

But Jaerros had already retreated, laughter echoing down the corridor like a trumpet-call to future embarrassment.

Vierros stood frozen in horror.

Ananti, despite every effort, began to laugh again.

He turned to her with an expression of such mournful dignity that she laughed harder, and at last even he yielded, burying his face for one mortified moment against her shoulder while she held him.

“This is a calamity,” he said into the fabric of her gown.

“It is not.”

“He will never cease.”

“Likely not.”

“I may have to abdicate.”

At this she tilted his face up and kissed his forehead, his eyelids, the bridge of his nose. By the time she reached his mouth, he was smiling despite himself.

“No,” she said. “You shall endure.”

“For the empire?”

“For me.”

He softened immediately. “Gladly.”

The brazier glowed low. The decrees lay waiting. The rain had passed at last, leaving the windows silver with the faint promise of dawn.

She drew him back to his chair and set the papers in order. He looked up at her with that same helpless devotion which still seemed to astonish him each time it rose.

“Will you remain?” he asked.

She touched the robe still spread across her lap, the one she was making with careful stitches and hidden moons. Then she bent and kissed the crown of his head.

“Until you are finished.”

He caught her hand and pressed it to his lips once more, less uncertain now, though no less reverent.

So she sat beside him while he wrote laws for an empire, and he wrote now with steadier hand than before. At times he paused to read a line aloud and ask her thought on it, and at times she leaned over his shoulder to correct some phrase too severe or too cold. Once he looked up from a decree and found her already watching him, and the blush rose in him all over again, sweet as first light on snow.

No herald marked the hour. No priest blessed it. No bard stood witness.

Yet in that lamp-lit chamber, amid ink and wool and the hush after rain, something truer than ceremony took root between them.

Not the fevered splendour of courtly performance. Not hunger dressed in silk. Not the brittle union of ambition and display.

This was gentler.

A shared vigil. A warm hand in the night. A robe sewn stitch by stitch. A poem hidden in a drawer. A child cherished at supper. The forgiveness of blushes. The holy foolishness of two hearts, each convinced it had no right to the other, and each beloved all the more for that very doubt.

And when dawn at last came pale through the high windows, it found the Emperor of Ederav bent over his laws, and beside him the woman who had come first as a lie and stayed as something much dearer—

his mercy,

his comfort,

his Ananti.