The beast knights — she was aware of the particular quality of everyone’s attention when her gaze moved toward them, the collective holding of breath among the court officials who were clearly waiting to see how she was going to handle the delicate question of the men who were, technically, both her personal guard and a power she had not yet found a way to fully account for. She had not acted yet. She was not unaware of the calculation others were doing about what that meant. They could do their calculations. She would act when she was ready to act, and not before.

"What happened to him?"

The guard she addressed was one of the senior ones — she did not know his name yet, but she had noted his rank from the configuration of his armor. He answered without hesitation, which she also noted. Men who hesitated before answering simple questions had usually decided they had reasons to be careful. This one spoke straight, which was either honesty or a very good performance of it.

"The Tenth Prince, Your Imperial Highness." The title landed a little awkwardly — the court had not entirely settled on how to address her, and this particular guard had chosen the safest available option. "He fell from the upper residential stairs when he was four years old. He has not walked since. His mother was the Concubine Rose." A brief pause. "She died during the famine eight years ago."

She let the information settle.

Eight years ago. He would have been two years old when his mother died. She looked at the boy’s hands on his lap — the stillness of them, the particular quality of a person who has learned that the world does not respond to what you want from it and has stopped, at a very deep level, wanting.

A child whose mother had died when he was two, in a palace where a mother’s protection was the only protection that mattered, in a wheelchair that made him unable to run from anything, with a face that she suspected had at some point made him the object of exactly the kind of attention that a child in his position would not want to receive from the people around him.

She understood the interest she was feeling. She had felt it before — the recognition of a thing that had been shaped by difficulty into something that difficulty could not quite break. It was different from pity. It had nothing in common with pity. Pity was a thing you felt at a distance, looking down. What she felt was something more like the feeling of recognizing a material for what it was — seeing the properties of it clearly, understanding what it could be made to bear.

She crouched down.

It was a small gesture, but it placed her at his level, and she saw the slight involuntary flicker of his eyes — still not quite meeting hers, but no longer entirely avoiding them either. He was aware of her in the way that prey is aware of something it has not yet categorized as safe or dangerous, and she was watching the moment of that categorization happening in real time.

"Would you like to come with me?"

The corridor was absolutely silent. She was aware of every person in it — the officials, the court ladies, the nursemaids, the other children who had gone very still in the way that children go still when something is happening that they do not understand but instinctively recognize as important. She was aware of all of it and she was paying attention to none of it. She was watching the boy.

The pause that followed was long enough to be interesting. Not the pause of someone calculating a political answer — he was ten, and whatever political education he had received in this palace had evidently been of the informal, painful kind, not the formal kind — but the pause of someone who had not, in a long time, been asked what he wanted, and who was now trying to remember how to have an answer to that question.

He looked up.

His eyes, when they finally met hers, were a dark, clear grey, and there was something in them that she had not expected — not hope, which would have broken her heart slightly, but something more guarded than hope and more alive than resignation. Caution. Genuine caution, the kind that comes from a real evaluation rather than a trained response. He was looking at her and he was thinking, and she found that she respected that more than she could have articulated.

"As you wish, elder sister."

The words were carefully chosen. Not ’Your Imperial Highness’, not ’my Empress’. ’Elder sister.’ She did not know if it was deliberate — if the ten-year-old in the wheelchair was playing a game she had not expected — or if it was simply the honest reflex of a child who had never had enough family to be careless with the category, and was offering the closest approximation of belonging that he knew how to name.

Either way, she found that the words did not bother her.

She rose. She turned to the guard.

"Have him transferred to my residential wing." She paused, because she had registered something she should have registered already, which was that she did not know his name. In the years she had been in this palace, she had never learned the name of the Tenth Prince. There had been no reason to. He had been invisible. "What is your name?"

He had not looked away. That was new, she thought — the absence of the downward cast of eyes that had been his default when she had arrived in front of him. He was looking at her with that careful, assessing grey gaze, and he said: "My name is Samuel."

Samuel.

A plain name, for a palace that loved elaborate names — the Tenth Prince, born to an obscure concubine, given a name that nobody had bothered to make imperial. She did not know if his mother had chosen it or if someone else had, but it suited him in the way that plain things suit people who have learned not to announce themselves.

"Good name." She turned back to the guard. "Transfer Samuel to my wing." She looked at the boy once more — at the clear, watchful grey eyes, at the extraordinary stillness of him, at the wheelchair that had been his only consistent constant in a world that had taken everything else. "From today, you are my designated successor."

The silence that followed was of a different quality entirely.

She heard it — felt it, almost — the way the air changed in the corridor, the collective arrest of breath from two dozen people who had all, in that same instant, been required to rapidly revise everything they had believed they understood about what was happening and what was going to happen next. She heard a sound from somewhere to her left that might have been a suppressed exclamation. She heard the sound of feet shifting on marble — the involuntary physical expression of mental destabilization.

She did not look at any of them.

She looked at Samuel.