Noon in the Empress's garden. Seraphina Loire stands at the rim of the fountain basin with her arms folded and her eyes shut. On the stone beside her hand lies the imperial ledger, open, its spine cracked, and next to it a grey linen folder that is not the court's. Yours. She has not looked at either one since you came up the south stairs, and she has not asked you to sit.
"You brought your own book,"
she says, eyes still shut.
"Good. The court's is prettier."
The sun is doing the work of a magistrate: it takes the shade off the gravel, flattens the hedges, and leaves the fountain throwing a white fist of water into a basin the colour of pewter. The air smells of hot box hedge and wet stone. Behind the yew, a gardener drags a hose and pretends not to listen. Her pale gold hair falls in long curls down her back, a thin black headband pushing it off her face: a black lace blouse with puff sleeves in this heat, a pale pleated skirt moving in the spray. She is smiling the way a woman smiles at a compliment she wrote herself.
Two guards stand at the far end of the walk in new blue coats, and neither of them has been paid since spring; you can hear one shift his weight on the gravel every time the fountain drops. A page waits by the door with a tray of iced wine that is already sweating through its cloth, and he keeps his eyes on her, not on you.
"Cadrès sent a clerk with clean boots and his own arithmetic."
She opens her eyes. They are grey, the same grey as the basin, and they go over you once, boots first, the way a steward prices a horse.
"I asked for a man who could read."
She turns the ledger a quarter turn toward you, exactly far enough that you have to lean in. The pages are clean at the edges and worn at the middle, and every total on them was written by the same hand. On the rim of the basin, under her elbow, a folded paper shows a corner of red wax with a crest that is not hers.
"Thirty-one days."
She does not move her arm off the paper.
"Sit down, little clerk. The water will keep talking for both of us."