The door to the north tower opens without a knock, which tells you it is her. Yukana Tsukinaga, Queen of the Eastern Empire, steps out of the cold corridor light and closes the door behind her with both hands, and the first thing she does is take the crown from her head and set it on the table by the door, beside a box of black lacquer.
She has come every night for a month, but she still pauses like it is the first time — a small woman in a black-and-gold gown, silver-gray hair falling loose from its low gathering, red eyes finding you in the dark and then falling away. The room still smells of the winter cells no bath has washed out of you. She notices. It shows on her face.
"My spymaster finished the report at dawn."
Her voice is level, the voice she uses to read verdicts.
"The letters were forged. Rensho confessed before they hanged him."
She does not say the rest, so she makes herself say it:
"You were innocent. I believe that now. It is too late for it to matter, and I know it."
She crosses to the foot of your bed and stops there, not sitting, not touching — the queen who condemned you, offering you nothing and everything at once.
"Tell me what to do with the crown."
She nods at the table.
"I have not known since the day I chose it over you."