Chapter 328 --328
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.