The empress looks up at the towering stone fortress of Saint Elstrid’s Sororia, a formidable and cold place so different from the palace, though it is only a twenty-minute ride from the palace gates. Cold and formidable as this Sororia might be, from what she’s heard, the one Beatriz is in now makes it look like a palace.
She grits her teeth at the thought of her firstborn daughter, who should be dead right along with Sophronia. Soon, she tells herself.
The unvarnished wood door swings open and the mother superior steps out into the sun. Mother Ippoline has always struck the empress as the living embodiment of the Sororia, every bit as cold, hard, and unyielding. Though, for the first time in their almost two decades of acquaintance, there is a trace of pity in the woman’s eyes. The empress doesn’t care for it.
“Your Majesty,” Mother Ippoline says, dropping into a brief curtsy. “What brings you to the Sororia today?”
“I find myself in need of solace, Mother Ippoline,” Margaraux says. She has run the words through her mind so often on the way here that they come out unstrained. It isn’t as though they are a lie, either. But she lets Mother Ippoline fill the gaps in herself, lets her make assumptions.
“Of course,” Mother Ippoline says, bowing her head. “We were all devastated to hear of Queen Sophronia’s death. Please, take whatever solace you can inside these walls.”
“Very kind of you, Mother,” Margaraux says. “I assume Sister Heloise is here?”
“Where else would she be?” the woman replies, eyebrows lifting. “She is in the usual place.”
“Of course she is,” Margaraux says, glancing back at her coachman, footman, and the rest of the entourage that accompanied her for this short excursion. “I’ll be back in an hour’s time,” she says. Without waiting for an answer, she follows Mother Ippoline into the Sororia, through the dark, cold, windowless halls lit only by a few scattered sconces with dying candles.
“I don’t think Sister Heloise enjoys your visits, Your Majesty,” Mother Ippoline says.
It’s a bold thing to say, but Margaraux appreciates the honesty.
“I don’t enjoy my visits to her, either,” she tells her. “But Sister Heloise and I understand each other. And I can’t imagine she receives any other visitors.”
Mother Ippoline doesn’t deny it. She stops before a nondescript wooden door and pushes it open, letting Margaraux through. Margaraux doesn’t have to ask for privacy, not anymore. Mother Ippoline closes the door behind her and Margaraux hears the steady fall of her footsteps retreating down the hallway.
It’s only then that she takes in the room—the chapel, as dark and dank as the rest of the Sororia, but with the benefit of a single stained-glass window above the altar, a dark blue sky with pinpricks of gilded glass for stars. It doesn’t let much light in, but Margaraux supposes that is the point—a room where it is always night, where the ersatz stars always shine.
A woman kneels before the altar, her plain homespun dress spread out around her and her hair bound underneath a wimple and hood. Her hair was pure gold once, the envy of every woman at court, though Margaraux supposes it must be going gray now, not unlike her own.
“Sister Heloise,” she says.
The woman’s spine stiffens at the sound of the name, but she doesn’t turn around. Margaraux tries again, using a name the woman hasn’t been called in nearly two decades, since she made her vows and joined the Sororia.
“Seline,” Margaraux says, her voice sharper at the edges.
With a heavy sigh, the woman hauls herself to her feet and turns to face her. It takes longer than it should, Margaraux thinks, before realizing how much time has passed. The woman is no longer the regal and imposing figure who intimidated a young Margaraux to the point of tears on more than one occasion. Or, rather, she is still that woman, only now she has become old, her skin wrinkled and sallow from so much time spent in this room, her spine stooped from hours kneeling before the altar.
Margaraux realizes that she has aged as well. Time, it seems, stops for no one, not even empresses.
“You always were an impudent creature,” the woman says, the words dripping venom.
“Yes,” Margaraux says placidly, taking a seat in the front pew and pushing her veil back. “It is why I took your throne and you were sent here.”
Age has not taken the woman’s ability to lift a single dark eyebrow, to level a look so withering a lesser woman would be turned to ash at her feet. But Margaraux is not a lesser woman. Not anymore.
“And here I thought that was because you wrapped an empyrea around your finger and brought the heavens down to serve your purpose,” she says.
Margaraux shrugs. “Yes, but I was impudent enough to do it, and you didn’t have the strength to stop me.”
“Strength I had, Margaraux,” the woman says quietly. “But I didn’t have the soul for it—or rather, perhaps I had too much of a soul.”
“A lot of good your soul has done you,” Margaraux tells her. “And it’s Empress to you.”
A ghost of a smile flickers across the woman’s mouth. “Yes, I know,” she says. “The title was mine before it was yours, after all. Before you pulled your strings and rewrote our fates, before I was sent to this place while you took my life, my husband, my country.”
“None of it was truly yours if you couldn’t hold on to it,” Margaraux tells her.
“Perhaps you’re right,” the woman says, not sounding terribly bothered by it. “I understand Sophronia is dead.”
She says it so flatly, so matter-of-factly. There is no apology in her voice, no simpering, no pity in her eyes. It takes Margaraux a second to remember she is grateful for it, that it’s why she’s here.
“And Temarin is mine,” she adds softly. “Just as Cellaria and Friv will be soon.”
“Three daughters in the ground, three lands in your grasp,” Seline says. “That is what you were promised so long ago, no?”
Margaraux doesn’t deny it. It was the first confession she made to her onetime rival, a little more than sixteen years ago, when her belly was so swollen she couldn’t stand for more than a minute at a time and had to be carried everywhere like a beached whale. She had truly hated being pregnant, but that had been the cost of power, so she’d paid it.
Three daughters in the ground, three lands in your grasp. That was what Nigellus promised her, and he has delivered on one count now. She does not doubt that the other two will be swift to follow—Beatriz has narrowly avoided a death sentence already, and then there is Daphne. After Prince Cillian’s early death, Margaraux grew impatient and worried that his bastard brother might meet the same fate. She’d hoped she could manage to kill Daphne before she married Bairre. It would have been simpler, without tying her dynasty to Bartholomew’s failing reign or Bairre’s tainted bloodline, and Daphne’s murder alone would have given her more than enough cause to send her troops into Friv—her troops and now Temarin’s as well. They would have made quick work of Friv’s ragtag rebellion.