Empress

The Empress knows that her husband retires to his concubine’s bedchamber when he leaves hers. She is young and drab, but not stupid.

As soon as the heady scent of the Emperor’s perfumes fades, Olia throws her silken sheets aside and calls out for her maidservant. The waif has hidden herself from view, but at her mistress’s beckoning she emerges from the shadows. Fara is fair-haired and gaunt, the same as all other servants the Emperor surrounds his plump, tattooed wife with. The Empress is soon dressed in a dark robe, her feet encased in thick slippers and her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck. If her servants weren’t so concerned with propriety, Olia would walk nude through the halls of her husband’s estates, her bruises and scrapes on display for the gossiping noblewomen. Let them yearn for her station then, once they know the violence in the Emperor.

Olia wonders, as she always does, if he shows such depravity to his concubine.

She knows the woman her husband favors. Even if the girl hadn’t borne a plethora of freckled, sharp-eyed brats, Olia would know her for her beauty. Where his wife is dark and plain, the Emperor’s concubine is pale and lovely. Too skinny, in Olia’s opinion, but most people in her new land are. Everything Olia lacks, the concubine has. All, that is, but the royal blood coursing through Olia’s miserable veins. The concubine could not give the Emperor a political advantage.

Dressed and seething, Olia stalks the paths of the garden with a stiff spine and clenched jaw. Her guards follow three steps behind, their hands on the pommel of their swords. She loathes every one of them. Their skin is unbroken by the tattoos that sully her. If she could, she would rip the pigments from her pores and water the dirt with her ink. The Emperor’s people do not write their histories in their flesh like hers do.

Sometimes, she wished her terror of a husband had never come and she’d married a man with skin like the night sky. Other days, she wished the Emperor had come sooner. Before she became the tattooed oddity in his palace.

Footsteps click against the cobblestone path and a sallow man turns the corner. His skin is heavily lined and sags, but his eyes glitter beneath thick brows. It takes Olia a moment to recognize the girl underneath the old man disguise; the spy’s identity is given away by the chrysanthemum she carries in wrinkled, trembling hands. The informant gives Olia a slight bow, but they give no other signs that they know each other. As Jun passes the Empress, she stumbles and grabs Olia’s wrist to steady herself. Something pricks Olia’s forearm, Jun mumbles a phrase in Olia’s language, then the guards are yanking the elderly man away and he’s apologizing in a quivering voice. Olia waves toward her guards without sparing the man a single glance.

“There’s no harm,” She says. “Let him be.” The uniformed men exchange pointed glances, then release Jun rather harshly. She vanishes into the foliage, and Olia knows that the elderly man will never be seen again. Jun wears a new disguise every time she meets her older sister.

The chrysanthemum has been crushed underfoot, its already drooping petals trampled by the careless guards. After a moment of consideration, Olia stoops and takes it into her hands. She immediately knows she’s made the right decision; the stem of the flower is coated in wax. She tucks the flower into her pocket and returns her attention to the guards.

“I wish to return to my chambers,” The eldest guard, a brute of a man named Haril, begins to protest. Olia knows that the disruption of her nightly routine will not go unreported. “The man smelled of sewage and I feel faint.”

This isn’t a lie; Jun forgets no small detail in her disguises, and Olia has always had an unfortunate reaction to the scent of trash. The guards are aware of this, and they lead her quickly back to her bedchamber. Fara has disappeared, no doubt to visit the scullery maid with a stash of banned roots. Olia’s maidservant will not return until dawn.

There’s a thin line of blood dripping into Olia’s elbow. She follows it to a slit in her skin just below her wrist, the only unmarked skin on her left arm. A thread, dyed the same shade as her flesh, slithers from the hole. It takes her a moment to grip it tightly with blood-slicked fingertips, then Olia yanks the thread from her forearm. She bites back a scream as her skin is torn again. A tiny vial, almost as thin as the pins in her hair, is tied onto the end of the thread.

Olia dabs a solvent, one of many remedies the healers leave with her when her husband visits, onto the scratch on her arm and shatters the vial on the corner of her tea table. She sweeps the shards of glass into the fireplace, and only then unravels the miniscule slip of paper found within the vial. From the chest she brought with her after her marriage, she removes a carefully shaped glass sphere wrapped in cloth. When she holds the glass to her eye, the diminutive note is large enough for her to see the spidery letters written upon it.

Olia-ha, many blessings on you, it reads, the same words her sister whispered to her. The endearment makes the Empress’ heart clench. The Emperor has taken an assassin into his employ. Do what we discussed. Gods provide.

The note is signed with only a letter K, but Olia knows that it was written by her eldest brother and father’s heir, Kihno. Jun and Kihno are the only people who know Olia’s suspicions, and it seems they were well-founded. Her husband is going to have her murdered.

Olia burns the paper as well as the glass vial and takes the chrysanthemum from her pockets. As she’d expected, there’s another vial within the wax, this much larger than the first and made of dissolvable material that she can scratch with her nail but not puncture. Within the vial, a clear liquid fills nearly the entire space. She can’t catch the tell-tale whiff of sulfur, but she infers that this liquid is made of Deathbelle, the deadliest flower in her country. When brewed with a combination of substances she can only guess at, it makes the most fast-acting and undetectable poison known to man. There is no cure, and once the poison is ingested, there’s no way to stop or slow its destruction.

Olia puts her ear to her door and can hear the guards talking quietly amongst themselves. There are three of them, cloaked in the Emperor’s red, and they will remain outside her chambers until they’re relieved in the morning. Fortunately, she has no need of her door; Olia knows of a long-forgotten tunnel behind a thick tapestry, the entrance triggered by a lever inside the fireplace. Olia uses a fire iron to trip the lever, then the wall trembles and the tapestry shudders. She lights a candle and slips behind the tapestry, the vial of poison clenched in her fist.

The tunnel has multiple exits, but Olia chooses one of many in the servant quarters. She shoves a thick wooden door, again concealed by a thick tapestry, aside and steps out into the hall. These are the day servants’ quarters, and the rooms she passes are all silent. A dog barks in the distance and her body tenses.

Olia reaches the end of the hall and peeks around the corner, toward the larger servants’ quarters. These belong to the favored servants, those that have been employed by the royals the longest or have proved their loyalty. Or, in the case of the very last room, servants who exceed their duties to the Emperor.

The Empress feels her lip curling and bites her tongue. Her husband and his concubine rest in the chamber beyond the beaten door. The man who stole her from her people, who scorns her in public and abuses her in private, who longs to have her murdered, sleeps next to the woman he prefers. Olia’s jealous despite herself. She despises the Emperor, but had he been a better man she may have had a good life. Perhaps, once he’s been taught a lesson, she will have that life.

There ought to be guards stationed outside, protecting the Emperor, but Olia knows that he has his secret methods of escape as well. Perhaps he uses a similar tunnel system to navigate the castle unseen. Regardless, the Emperor is unguarded and vulnerable. Olia pushes the door open and is slightly surprised to see that there’s nothing hindering her path. Jun said there was no lock, but it’s much different seeing rather than knowing. Olia slips into the darkened room and closes the door behind her.

There aren’t many furnishings in the chamber, but they’re luxurious. The concubine is a seamstress, and not even a very good one. She doesn’t deserve such extravagance. The bed takes up half the bedchamber, and there’s an empty bassinet shoved into the corner. Olia feels a pang for a moment, then remembers the disrespect she’s been given. The Empress has rarely come into contact with the concubine, but she remembers the scorn in the prettier woman’s face when they passed.

Olia leans over the Emperor and his concubine, her face a mask of pain though she doesn’t realize it. Her husband looks so pleasant, sleeping beside the woman he cares more for than he does his wife. The concubine is more beautiful than Olia remembered, her light hair spread across the feather pillows and her lips slightly parted. Even in sleep, she appears haughty. Her slim form makes Olia burn with resentment.

Before her conscious pricks at her again, the Empress raises her fist to the concubine’s face and deposits the deadly vial between her parted lips. As the vial dissolves, the concubine wakes and her blue eyes open, wide with terror. Olia presses her hand over the woman’s lips so she cannot scream or spit out the poison, and almost immediately the concubine goes completely limp. A moment later, her eyes glaze and her chest stills.

Olia regrets taking a life, but she feels victorious despite herself. Her husband will wake to a dead body, and he can never publicly mourn the loss of a lowly servant girl. Should he try, Olia’s father would annul their marriage and declare war upon the Emperor.

Olia leaves him one last hint, in case he cannot piece together that she is the cause of his concubine’s death.

The next morning, Fara rouses Olia with shaking hands, her lips still stained by the roots she’s burned. The Empress greets her husband in her nightclothes, her hair loose. He hates her coarse hair, and she challenges him by refusing to tame it.

The Emperor is red with anger and half-dressed, his stomach spilling out of his shirt. Olia is disgusted by him, but she conceals her revulsion with a pleasant smile.

“Good morning, dear husband,” She chirps. The Emperor’s face screws into a scowl. “If I’d known you would visit me, I would be more presentable. I apologize.”

“Get out,” The Emperor growls to the guards and Fara. They scurry into the hall and the door closes, leaving Olia with her enraged husband. She has a twinge of fear before she stifles it.

The Emperor raises his hand as if to slap her, but Olia doesn’t move. She stares steadily into his beady, furious eyes and allows herself a genuine smirk. Instead of striking her, the Emperor tosses a small bundle into Olia’s chest. She doesn’t bother to pick it up, for she knows what it contains. She left it for him to find: dried plants, the weeds he’d forced his physician to poison her womb with to stop her pregnancy.

“You witch,” Her husband snarls, but he can say no more. The assassin’s body and the corpse he woke beside cannot even be addressed for fear of retaliation. Her father will not punish an abusive husband, but he would be able to ignore the slight if Olia proclaimed her husband unfaithful.

Olia tilts her head and her lips spread in a ghastly smile. “You’ll be pleased to know that I’m with child, husband,” She declares. The Emperor’s skin goes white. “According to your priest, it’s a boy.”

Olia cannot disguise her glee as her husband sweeps past their servants with the veins in his neck bulging with fury. She’s untouchable now

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